AN incompetent part-time farmer faces the loss of his entire herd of cows after a rainstorm sent manure pouring from his land through a nearby pensioner’s house.

June Crossley had to abandon her home in Rosedale Abbey, near Pickering, for a month while the inches of stinking cow slurry left by the 3am flood in her kitchen were cleared up, Louise Azmi, for the Environment Agency told York Crown Court.

It was one of a series of problems caused over ten years by the piles of manure that John Cockerill let accumulate on his smallholding that was home to 70 cows. Liquid from the mess ran across roads and polluted a local beck.

It cost the Environment Agency £6,296 to clear the smallholding of manure.

After the case, agency officer and ex-farmer Jim Richards said by 2008 the four-acre field had about 240 tonnes of manure that was up to ten feet thick in places. It should not have housed more than 20 animals.

Judge Jim Spencer QC told Cockerill: “You have behaved in the most irresponsible manner.

“You deliberately and for your own purposes built up your herd to a number you could not manage – neither the animals but, more importantly, the waste that they created.”

Council groundsman Cockerill, 45, of Rosedale East, near Pickering, pleaded guilty to polluting a watercourse and keeping controlled waste on a smallholding.

He had previously admitted animal health welfare offences relating to his cows for which Scarborough magistrates gave him a 12-week prison sentence suspended for two years on condition that he did 80 hours’ unpaid work. For the manure offences, the judge ordered Cockerill to pay £10,015 in fines, compensation, costs and a Government imposed surcharge.

The judge said: “If it means you have to sell your stock, that is what you must do, so that when you start again, you do it right.”

For Cockerill, Ruth Cranidge said he had had to sell 55 of his animals following the previous court case and now had 15 cows with calves, worth £800 each. He had spent more than his full-time salary working for Scarborough District Council on feed for the animals and lived a “chaotic” lifestyle.

He had taken on more than he could handle.