A RESPECTED Dales farmer, whose animals won prizes at agricultural shows, left dead sheep on her fields and a lamb dying from a gaping wound, a court heard yesterday.

North Yorkshire mother-of-four Helen Benson, who was born into a farming family and decided to go-it-alone when her father retired a decade ago, had become another victim of the crisis in agriculture, her solicitor Geoffrey Mochrie told Harrogate magistrates.

Prosecutor Derek Smith said that when a trading standards officer visited Benson's Wensleydale holding after a tip-off, there were dead sheep in two fields with others in the bucket of a tractor and a barn. In all, 12 carcasses were found, along with the lamb, which had a 4in diameter wound to its right side.

Benson, of Keeper's Cottage, Tanfield Lodge, West Tanfield, near Ripon, pleaded guilty to causing the lamb unnecessary suffering and to four charges of failing to dispose of sheep carcasses properly, with nine more counts taken into consideration.

She was give a conditional discharge for 18 months on payment of £553 costs and told by presiding magistrate David Davies that it had been poor husbandry rather than deliberate cruelty which had led her to court.