Sheep farmer Lester Gosbee is unhappy.

Mr Gosbee, a Frittenden Parish Councillor for the past 28 years, said it had become almost impossible to get Tunbridge Wells council to come out to the village to collect fly-tipped rubbish.

There are currently two piles that are causing offence - a heap of builder's rubble, including a bathtub and a kitchen sink, that is almost as tall as Mr Gosbee himself, and a separate pile of tyres, both dumped in Staplehurst Road.

Mr Gosbee has reported both to the borough council multiple times.

He said: "They've been there over a month.

"The borough's response has been that they don't pick up rubbish from private property and these piles are on private land and not in the highway.

"That's adding insult to injury."

"Farmers arrive to find they can't get their livestock into a field because the entrance is blocked with rubbish, and then they have to incur the cost of removing it as well.

"The borough is just reversing responsibility onto the landowners."

Mr Gosbee of Manor Farm is backed up by agricultural expert Toby Baker, of Farmers and Mercantile Insurance Brokers. He said farmers were silently suffering the scourge of flytipping.

Official figures showed there were 554 incidents of fly-tipping on agricultural land in the South East last year, but the true figure was much higher, because many farmers did not even report fly-tipping, knowing that it would not be picked up.

“Flytipping is a scourge on the farming community and their plight is not reflected in these figures as they exclude the majority of private-land incidents,” said Mr Baker.

“Councils spend millions every year on clean-up costs but private land-owners are left to suffer with little or no assistance or recourse.

“Farmers are already faced with a myriad of difficulties, from economic uncertainty to market volatility, and having to fork out dealing with someone else’s mess just compounds these stresses.”

Mr Baker said the average financial impact to the business owner was over £1,000 a time, but warned: "If a farmer’s land becomes a flytipping ‘hotspot’, costs can quickly escalate and become crippling.”

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