The Siġġiewi local council has made a public appeal to Mepa to take action against the owner of a cow farm which it says is pumping manure onto a public road.

The sizeable farm is located opposite Id-Dar tal-Providenza. Manure slurry flows down the road onto the surrounding agricultural fields, posing an environmental and human health risk.

Mayor Karol Aquilina said residents had filed several reports with the authorities on the matter but no action was taken.

Dr Aquilina said the situation was unacceptable: “The slurry being pumped onto the road poses a risk to everyone who uses this road, including farmers. Mepa has an obligation to ensure this environmental abuse is stopped once and for all.”

The planning authority has issued two enforcement notices on the farm: in 2007 (over the construction of a first-floor generator room without a permit) and seven years later.

The enforcement notice served last year to owner Louis Azzopardi refers, among other things, to the lack of a waste management plan for the farm. Since Malta joined the EU, livestock farms are obliged to install manure clamps and dispose of waste through bowsers. Farms that did not have such facilities should have closed down.

Yet even farms equipped with waste management facilities have difficulty abiding by the law because no disposal facilities exist for livestock farms. At the moment, such waste from farms is either dumped in manholes, causing problems to the Water Services Corporation, or on agricultural fields as fertiliser, causing a host of other problems. Slurry cannot be dumped into the open environment and its use on agricultural fields is illegal.

In 2014, Times of Malta reported the use of slurry as fertiliser in agricultural fields across the country. The spread of food-borne infections is one of the main health risks resulting from the use of unprocessed slurry in agriculture, according to food scientist Vasilis Valdramidis, a senior lecturer at the university’s Faculty of Health Sciences. “Washing the harvest with water and/or vinegar can reduce the microbial risks but not necessarily eliminate them.”

The Ombudsman’s office is investigating the health and environmental risks of the illegal use of slurry on agricultural fields. Initial findings indicate the practice is geographically “widespread”.

Health Minister Konrad Mizzi said in Parliament last year that 19 public complaints on the matter had been received from localities in Malta and Gozo in two years.

Calls to the office of the agriculture parliamentary secretary for an explanation remained unanswered at the time of writing.

Efforts to contact the farmer in question proved futile.