“Build first. Operate for years. Answer complaints later. Then seek permission after the event.”
That is how residents of Stow Bedon in Norfolk describe life beside Cherry Tree Farm on their fundraising page. The farm is a pig unit permitted for up to 6,990 pigs. In 2023 the parish council said residents were complaining “almost on a daily basis” about the smell and noise.
Ann Cuthbert, 68, has lived in the village since 1991 and her land lies about 300 metres from the farm. Before dawn on 26 October, she says, the smell climbed from level three to level six – “extremely strong” on the intensity scale residents use when reporting to the Environment Agency. “This is not a complaint about an unpleasant agricultural smell,” she told the agency.
She says the noise of feed deliveries being unloaded sounds “like a pneumatic drill”, audible indoors, even with the windows shut, and that farm traffic is “much higher than we were told at planning application stage”.
The farm is run by Wayland Farms, part of the FTSE 250 meat producer, Cranswick. Earlier this year the AGtivist charted the march of the megafarms on Wicked Leeks, including legal challenges that stopped new units before they were built. Stow Bedon raises a different question. What can planning and environmental regulation actually do once a unit is already built and operating?
Built one way, approved another
Planning permission granted in 2019 turned a small sow and piglet unit into a large finishing unit, and the sheds were fully stocked by June 2021. The environmental permit was based on enclosed sheds with solid walls and fans in the roof. What went up had curtain sides and mesh gable ends, so air, and with it, the smell, can leave through the walls.
In March 2022 the Environment Agency told Breckland Council that the site “as built does not reflect what was applied for in the permit”, and that the operator would need to apply to vary it. An inspection the following month recorded two permit breaches.
The variation application was later returned as “not duly made” because the odour and ammonia information was inadequate, according to the agency’s statement to the inquiry. The permit was never varied.
Instead the agency served enforcement notices in November 2022 and May 2023. The operator fitted solid gable doors, enclosed the manure store, raised its chimneys and moved manure off site every weekday.
In October 2023 the agency confirmed the notices had been met, and it later told the inquiry that “no permit variation is required at this stage”. Asked by Wicked Leeks about the permit’s current status, the agency did not say whether it still expects a variation.
Cranswick declined to comment for this article. It has previously said it supplied “all the information required” in 2021, and that it operates within its permit and wants to be a good neighbour.
Planning after the fact
Breckland Council took more than four years to decide the retrospective planning application. As its officers noted in a related report, the retrospective nature of an application “cannot be given weight”, so it is judged as if nothing has yet been built. The council served an enforcement notice in July 2025 and refused permission on 21 October 2025, saying that without an environmental impact assessment it could not rule out significant effects.
Cranswick appealed both, and an eight-day public inquiry in Dereham closed on 2 October. Breckland did not answer questions from Wicked Leeks and pointed to its planning portal.
The delay mattered. Under planning law, building work that goes unchallenged for long enough can become immune from enforcement. In March 2025 Emma Montlake, Head of Casework at the Environmental Law Foundation, which supports residents, wrote to the council about its failure to decide the applications. If the development became immune, she warned, responsibility would fall “fairly and squarely on your council and amount to clear maladministration”.
The two regimes now pull against each other. The Environment Agency warned the inquiry that undoing the gable and manure store changes, or removing the chimney extensions, to satisfy planning could put the farm in breach of its permit.
What residents can do
The first route is the Environment Agency’s incident hotline. Residents say they have made more than 750 complaints. The agency said in its evidence that around 500 came from a single property and that most are classed as minor and not routinely attended. It told Wicked Leeks it “continues to carry out regular inspections and odour assessments and remains in ongoing contact with the operator”.
The second route is the inquiry itself. To take part as a formal party, residents needed a barrister and independent experts, and set out to crowdfund £28,000. At the time of going to press, they have raised about £10,700.
Taking part carries risk. Cranswick has applied for a partial award of costs against Ann, as the formal party at the inquiry, which is yet to be decided. “We did not create these regulatory problems, we did not choose the appeal process, and yet it is we who are being made to carry the financial risks,” says Ann Cuthbert. “That is what makes Cranswick’s costs application so deeply intimidating and the entire situation so profoundly unfair.”
Residents have also complained to the Office for Environmental Protection and the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman about the Environment Agency’s regulation of the farm, according to CPRE Norfolk.
Still waiting
The Planning Inspectorate’s decision is not expected for several months. Nearby in Great Hockham, a poultry expansion started without permission was withdrawn in October.
At Stow Bedon the sheds keep running and residents keep phoning the hotline. A system built to weigh harm before it happens is still working out what to do about harm inflicted after the fact. For the people next door, that wait is measured in mornings like 26 October.
Main image c/o We Animals, taken at an intensive pig farm in Italy.
All other imagery c/o Ann Cuthbert, of Cranswick’s “Cherry Tree Farm”.
Find the Crowdfunding campaign & donate here
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