Earl Spencer has said organised fly-tipping forced his family to sell the 310 acres of Northamptonshire farmland it had farmed since 1893.
Writing in the Daily Mail, he claims that a single dumped load cost £40,000 to clear.
The land at Dallington was sold to developers last year and will become 1,800 houses, a secondary school and two primary schools, Spencer wrote.
He said the dumping went far beyond casual littering. It included lorry-loads of construction waste tipped at night, asbestos sheeting left in a hedgerow and, on one occasion, 60 burnt-out cars stacked on former pasture. Three years ago estate staff shovelled away half a ton of plastic bags, thrown over a wall from a local restaurant, containing rotten meat and human waste.
The 250-year-old farmhouse on the land was set on fire last year and had to be demolished, he wrote, after the family struggled to find anyone willing to live there.
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