The mystery of the foul stench that has swept across southern England was solved yesterday when German pig farmers admitted: "It's our fault."
Farmers said they had spread the manure from millions of pigs over their fields almost simultaneously after cold weather forced them to delay the start of the muckspreading season.
Germany has an estimated 25 million pigs with many farms concentrated in the regions around the port city of Hamburg. The pungent smell - Der Gestank as the Germans call it - from millions of gallons of porcine waste was carried across the North Sea and the Channel to England by unusual easterly winds. The smell spread quickly, causing people from Dover to Devon to hold their noses. The Met Office said the winds would continue to bring the pigs' aroma to England until Tuesday.
DPA, Germany's national press agency, accepted that Germany was to blame in a report yesterday which stated: "The cause for the foul atmosphere has been found: the east wind and the German pigs... a stinkbomb from Germany."
The respected broadsheet Die Welt said: "It stinks to Englishmen in the truest sense of the word - a foul smell of the European mainland in the air over the south of Great Britain.
"The stink is a mixture from dung and industrial exhaust gases, which even the Queen is turning her nose up at, it is said. The guilty parties: German pigs."
"German farmers insult English noses," said the headline in the Rhein Zeitung newspaper.
The N-24 TV news channel carried a headline on its website yesterday evening saying: "The Great Stink - English sour over German pigs."
The powerful odour reached Kent and Sussex on Friday morning and swept across most of southern England. The Met Office, emergency services and local radio stations received hundreds of calls from people demanding to know the source of the stench.
But farmers in Germany offered little sympathy to those whose nostrils were offended on this side of the Channel. They said they had to make a living and had no control over the wind.
Hauke Jaacks, a farmer in Rissen, north-western Germany, who sprayed 5,000 gallons of manure on his 25 acres, said: "Sorry about the smell but you have to put up with it. I need the grass to grow to feed my cattle."
A phone-in commentator on Bavarian Radio said: "The English like to blame the Germans for everything."
The "manure season" was officially allowed to begin on February 1 but farmers waited until Friday to begin, because until then it had been too cold.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/20/wstink120.xml
