awittyusername
Member
Hi everyone, looking for a bit of advice.
I'm not a farmer, I live in a house that shares a border with a field which we purchased in Aug 22.
It turns out that the field floods during the winter in the corner closest to our house and looking back at historical aerial images on Google maps and street view, it does indeed show signs that this has been a problem for years.
The soil is maybe just over a meter deep (in our garden) before you hit clay and I don't know how deep this runs for. There is a ditch that runs the width of the field where it meets the road that we both face onto, but it doesn't appear to be maintained. There's no evidence of there being a ditch in recent times running the length of the field that borders with us, but during the summer there was a fresh, green strip of wild grasses that ran in a perfectly straight line all the way down from where the flood usually is to the other end of the field. This made me think there was some sort of drainage channel cut in underneath, but it doesn't seem to do anything when the heavens open.
But to cut a long story short, it appears to have been getting worse recently as we know the farmer had the water board sample the water to determine if any of it was from burst pipes. There was a leak, within feet of the edge of the field where it floods which was fixed earlier in the year and we thought, "thank goodness, that was the problem all along."
Well, it turns out it wasn't and the flood is back with a vengeance this year. Both this year and last, the water has caused the water table in this particular corner of the field, and under our house, to rise to such and extent that we have 6 inches of water under the floorboards, the house is perpetually full of condensation, we're forever cleaning mold from the lower corners of rooms downstairs and it's preventing the septic tank from functioning properly, it simply can't drain into our garden.
To make matters worse, the field that was left fallow, he turned this year with the intention of planting wheat which has levelled out the field somewhat and has resulted in the water spreading further than before and it's starting to spread onto our drive and into our garden.
To my mind, this could be solved with either a culvert installing under the road, an auger hole drilling past the clay and backfilling with gravel or a ditch to take the water downhill to the other end of the field where there's an uncultivated patch that has been fenced off - none of which I can do or have a say in as it needs to happen off my land.
I want to stay on the right side of our neighbour, but I don't know how to approach this matter with them because I don't know where I stand morally, legally or what is considered being generally good neighbours in farming circles!
I'm not a farmer, I live in a house that shares a border with a field which we purchased in Aug 22.
It turns out that the field floods during the winter in the corner closest to our house and looking back at historical aerial images on Google maps and street view, it does indeed show signs that this has been a problem for years.
The soil is maybe just over a meter deep (in our garden) before you hit clay and I don't know how deep this runs for. There is a ditch that runs the width of the field where it meets the road that we both face onto, but it doesn't appear to be maintained. There's no evidence of there being a ditch in recent times running the length of the field that borders with us, but during the summer there was a fresh, green strip of wild grasses that ran in a perfectly straight line all the way down from where the flood usually is to the other end of the field. This made me think there was some sort of drainage channel cut in underneath, but it doesn't seem to do anything when the heavens open.
But to cut a long story short, it appears to have been getting worse recently as we know the farmer had the water board sample the water to determine if any of it was from burst pipes. There was a leak, within feet of the edge of the field where it floods which was fixed earlier in the year and we thought, "thank goodness, that was the problem all along."
Well, it turns out it wasn't and the flood is back with a vengeance this year. Both this year and last, the water has caused the water table in this particular corner of the field, and under our house, to rise to such and extent that we have 6 inches of water under the floorboards, the house is perpetually full of condensation, we're forever cleaning mold from the lower corners of rooms downstairs and it's preventing the septic tank from functioning properly, it simply can't drain into our garden.
To make matters worse, the field that was left fallow, he turned this year with the intention of planting wheat which has levelled out the field somewhat and has resulted in the water spreading further than before and it's starting to spread onto our drive and into our garden.
To my mind, this could be solved with either a culvert installing under the road, an auger hole drilling past the clay and backfilling with gravel or a ditch to take the water downhill to the other end of the field where there's an uncultivated patch that has been fenced off - none of which I can do or have a say in as it needs to happen off my land.
I want to stay on the right side of our neighbour, but I don't know how to approach this matter with them because I don't know where I stand morally, legally or what is considered being generally good neighbours in farming circles!