Spreading slurry in the middle of a holiday season stinks

Spreading slurry in the middle of a holiday season stinks, writes Damien Enright

Saturday, July 16, the middle of the summer season. Our London friends have swopped a cottage for their London home. The owner has left sheets and the loose covers for the upholstery drying on the clothes line, because for days before, it had rained. However, the forecast was good. In the evening, bring fresh mackerel and we’d have a romantic barbecue on their lawn. “Oh, to be in Ireland!’, my pal’s wife tells me on the phone. ‘The space, the West Cork air!”.

But hardly are their suitcases unpacked when, out of the blue sky, a wave of stinking air wafts through a window, noxious, toxic, bacteria-bearing air. It’s slurry. It’s Saturday afternoon, the middle of the holiday season, and someone, whoever, is spreading slurry with a splash-plate tank along a field edge, 30 metres from my friends’ lawn.

Alarm! Within seconds, she and her husband are in the backyard, frantically pulling the sheets and covers off the line. They dash back indoors, but it’s too late. Windows were open (for the west Cork air). Upstairs and downstairs, they slam them shut but the house stinks in every room. Their bedroom smells like a slurry pit. The kitchen is foul. The covers are too damp to put on the sofa and armchairs, and they have absorbed the smell. The sheets — in fact everything — will have to be laundered again. The barbecue is off. One cannot step outdoors.

The person spreading the slurry, having emptied one tank, leaves and comes back with another. And another. Slurry on top of slurry, and no hope of an outdoor eating experience for our city friends in the salt-laced west Cork air. A warm evening, the smoke from the barbie, the sizzling mackerel; all this is not to be. When my wife and I arrive and step out of our car, the stink near pole-axes us. Feeling immensely guilty, we joke with the visitors about agricultural smells, the joys of rural living. But we are ashamed. The spreader’s lack of consideration, is boorish. The farmers of Ireland are not like this.

Even our friends know that farmers have to spread slurry. If the tanks are full, it has to be spread, never mind that it’s the middle of July in a holiday village. But why at a weekend, and a weekend forecast to be dry? At any time, the smell of the spread would have been dampened down. But the spreader — not a farmer, but an agricultural contractor — chose to spread at the start of an exceptional, near-unbroken five days of hot, dry weather. During that time the green field alongside our friends’ holiday home remained caked in pig excrement. And, as it turned out, the smell lasted three days, and made the holiday house a shuttered prison.

There ought to be a law! If farmers or agricultural contractors can’t afford to buy slurry injectors, there should be a subsidy. Or groups of farmers should buy one, and share its use. I’ve enquired about the cost of a 4m injector. It’s €23,000, and there may be grants.

Shallow injection of slurry on grassland reduces ammonia emissions, compared to surface spreading. It increases plant nitrogen utilisation. With splash plate spreading only 8% of nitrogen is captured in July, compared with 26% in January.

While sympathetic with the need of farmers to discharge effluent on the land, I fail to understand why this had to do be done only 30 metres away from the a lawns of a dozen family homes on a summer weekend, with a further dozen homes within smelling distance. It was an outrage.

Families congregate on summer weekends and this was one person spoiling the precious holidays of two dozen families with children and grannies and guests and city workers escaping the city at the weekend. Have non-farming citizens and paying visitors no rights when they step into the country? Have they no claim on the air of Ireland? Are they to be subjected to air-borne bacillus, their homes and furnishings impregnated with the stuff?

This behaviour gives all farmers a bad name. Responsible farmers are in the overwhelming majority. They respect their non-farming neighbours and spread, when possible, on weekdays, when light rain is forecast. Some inform neighbours when a spread is imminent. We have never experienced such disregard in 25 years of rural living. We saw nobody else spreading as we abandoned the house and fled west, to eat at a restaurant.

Forty eight hours later the visitors tell us that that the house, despite all windows and doors being closed, still stinks.