DOs Carefully plan all storage and handling arrangements for livestock slurries and manures, animal feedstuffs, silage effluent, agricultural fuel oil, dirty water, fertilisers, veterinary medicines, chemicals and pesticides at your farm. Maintain a suitable distance from any watercourse including ditches (e.g. 10m) or drinking water supplies (e.g. 50m), especially when handling or applying fertilisers, organic wastes, pesticides or other chemicals. Think about ways to protect and enhance your local environment and how to minimise the impacts of diffuse agricultural pollution of water, land and air. Account for every input, especially of nutrients, pesticides and other chemicals through careful planning. Follow the Scottish Executive "Four Point Plan", the individual components of which are specified as follows: - produce and implement a risk assessment for manures and slurries;
- produce and implement a farm nutrient plan;
- protect watercourses and carry out water margin management;
- undertake a separate assessment of farmyard drainage.
Ensure that any biobed, reedbed, wetland or infiltration system installed to reduce the risk of diffuse pollution is discussed with SEPA before it is constructed. Obtain specialist advice when considering using wetlands, ponds or infiltration systems to treat contaminated roof or dirty yard run-off at the farm steading. Adopt "good housekeeping" and waste minimisation practices that aim to prevent pollution at source. Protect your soil by following the guidance in this Code regarding preventing damage and erosion. Use buffer strips and other measures to reduce surface run-off from fields. Minimise the area of farmyard and roads over which animals can excrete and equipment transporting slurry is moved. Take steps to control the run-off for these areas. | DON'Ts Employ any agricultural contractor or company involved in spreading organic waste to land unless they are competent and suitably trained, aware of legal requirements and are willing to follow the guidance in this booklet and the PEPFAA Code. Allow the run-off from roads, farmyards, hard standings and ring feeder areas used by stock to discharge directly to a watercourse. Allow livestock to have access to watercourses. Instead, provide water at drinking troughs, if at all possible. Leave cultivated soils which are light textured without a crop or stubble cover during the autumn and winter period. Use pesticides, veterinary medicines or chemicals unless there is an identified need. Allow the rain water from poultry buildings that are ventilated to the roof to discharge directly to a watercourse. Directly overspray a watercourse when using pesticides. Hesitate in getting involved in catchment partnerships with your neighbours, FWAG, SAC, SEPA and others. Forget that over abstraction of irrigation water from watercourses can cause downstream water pollution. |