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“It was downhill after that,” Murray said.

At the centre of the dispute is the Gallants’ assertion that Murray and his son deposited hundreds of loads of raw cow manure on a strip of land adjacent to the Gallant property in November 2013.

“He was just roaring across with the tractor and the windows were shaking in the house,” David Gallant said in an interview, adding that the pungent dumping continued into the wee hours.

The pile eventually grew to be about 18 metres long, 13 metres wide and as high as his nearby three-car garage, David Gallant said.

He said he asked Murray to move the pile, but he refused.

Murray said he had no choice but to put the pile near the garage because to do otherwise would have been unsafe. He said it was late in the fall, the ground was wet and slippery from recent rains, and it would have been dangerous to move the manure down an adjacent hill.

The frustrated farmer insisted the mound — Gallant called it a “manure mountain” — soon froze solid and did not stink at all.

“We couldn’t spread it or nothing because it got too late in the year,” Murray said. “My lawyer didn’t explain to the judge that seasoned manure and frozen manure doesn’t smell.”

Photos taken at the time show a large, dark mass near the garage, some of it seeping under a wire fence and onto the Gallants’ property.

Justice George Rideout of the Court of Queen’s Bench concluded that Murray dumped the dung to antagonize the Gallants, saying his actions were “wilful and reprehensible.”