DEVON county council is having to sell some of its agricultural properties to help pay the £2,500,000 cost of new anti-pollution measures that came into force this year.

Nearly one third of that cost is being spent in North Devon.

The investment will help to establish long-term viability of the council's farm estate.

It's a substantial outlay at a time when the county council has a long queue of people wanting to either enter farming or to further develop their farming skills and enterprise.

The controversial new regulations require farmers to build new high-capacity slurry stores.

They should be big enough to keep farmyard waste for up to five months on holdings within areas considered by the Environment Agency to be Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (NVZ).

The aim is to prevent any run off and to regulate field fertilisation to avoid polluting rivers and streams.

But some farmers and farm leaders believe that the River Taw catchment is wrongly designated as a vulnerable zone. They say the water quality pollution readings in the Taw Estuary are being misinterpreted by the Environment Agency as an effect of nitrogen from agricultural land.

Their argument is that the readings are heavily influenced by the sewage outfall from South West Water's Ashford works.

The council's investment in slurry storage to comply with the new regulations in North Devon is £766,584.

Last year the council decided to keep most of its agricultural estate but to sell some to pay for new investment as well as to supplement council resources.

As a result 100 per cent of capital receipts generated from farm disposals, including farm buildings for redevelopment, are retained by the Estate to meet current and future statutory obligations, for inward investment and, on occasion to buy replacement land and/or farms.

But when land is sold for development, the estate keeps only 16 per cent and the remaining 84 per cent is transferred to the County Council's capital programme.

The property that has been sold generally consists of poorly equipped farmsteads and farmhouses with large maintenance liabilities and in most cases the majority of the land from that holding is being amalgamated to neighbouring holdings.

Despite the cost of complying with the new laws Devon County councillors are confident they can maintain the farms estate at around 10,000 acres.

Those acres are farmed on 80 individual tenancies, many of them starter-farms for new entrants.

Others are described as progressive farm tenancies, and all are limited to a total of 25-year terms.