Twenty-eight activist volunteers, including Greenpeace executive director Peter Mond, 4th Baron Melchett, cut down about a sixth of the 2.4 hectare field, owned by farmers William, Eddie and John Brigham.
While the protest was part of a larger movement by Greenpeace against GM crops, the leadership of Melchett and the number of arrests led it to be particularly well-covered in the national press.
The ITE had begun the trial on behalf of the UK Government, the biotechnology industry, English Nature, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
Tensions initially escalated when William Brigham told the Eastern Daily Press about the trial crop; a meeting was held in the local village hall in response, and Greenpeace became involved.
The acquittal of the activists of all charges of theft and criminal damage the next year was seen as a "landmark legal verdict" for activism against GM crops by BBC News.
William owned Walnut Tree Farm, was the eldest member of the family, and was the former chair of the Norfolk National Farmers' Union (NFU).
William had accepted a trial of GM maize by the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE) on behalf of the UK Government, the biotechnology industry, English Nature, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB),[3] as part of a farm-scale government trial of various GM crops over seven plots of land,[4][3] including experimental T25 maize[3] made by the Norfolk agro-chemical company AgrEvo.
Also that month, Human Genome Project members painted a large X across a rapeseed farm in Scotland, and demonstrators pulled up a crop of spring wheat in Lincolnshire.
[13] Protestors aside from Melchett included a Baptist vicar,[2][14] a beauty consultant,[2] a vegan and vegetarian restaurateur, an engineer, and a mature student studying social policy and environmental science.
[15] Michael Uwins, Greenpeace's East of England co-ordinator, lived nearby to Lyng, and was invited to London on a need to know basis in the summer of 1999 to organise the action.
[2] Before dawn on 26 July 1999,[2] Melchett drove a wagon with an industrial crop cutter attached from his family farm in Ringstead, Norfolk to Lyng.
[14][8] Melchett was charged with theft and criminal damage, and was refused bail by the court, spending two nights in a Norwich remand centre despite plans to fly to Tanzania for a two-week family holiday.
[1] The jury found the activists not guilty of theft,[2][10] though was unable to reach a verdict on whether they had committed criminal damage after a 7.5 hour deliberation,[10] and was discharged.
[17][2] On 20 September 2000, following the retrial which took 2 weeks with 5 hours of jury deliberation[11] and involved Iceland supermarket chairman Malcolm Walker giving evidence in support of Melchett,[18] all of those charged were cleared of causing criminal damage.
[10][6] Greenpeace stated that the acquittal decision was a legal landmark and that they were "delighted" by the verdict, and Melchett again called on the government and Tony Blair to end the GM farm trials following the victory,[10] putting forward that "the government is currently reviewing separation distances imposed between GM crops and other similar crops - separation distances which we said were completely inadequate when we took action in July 1999.
"[11] The defendants were awarded their costs, estimated at £100,000 for both trials, and Peter Tidey, Chief Crown Prosecutor for Norfolk, warned that the verdict did not mean future protests of a similar sort would not be prosecuted.
[6] Jeremy Corbyn, then Member of Parliament for Islington North, commented on the arrests, stating that the charges and holding of Melchett overnight "actually makes him and others a martyr to the cause".
"[7] The Observer reported that the Soil Association and Friends of the Earth privately disagreed with the action as they said it risked losing the argument over the "creeping commercialisation" of GM crop trials.
"[10] A spokesman for the Supply Chain Initiative for Modified Agricultural Crops (SCIMAC), which represented GM chemical companies, stated that it was "disappointed that an extremist minority didn't have enough confidence in the scientific strength their own arguments to let the science decide.
[22] The action and court trials were compared twice by The Guardian and once by The Washington Post to a similar storyline in the BBC radio soap opera The Archers that was broadcast the same year as the incident.
Melchett was compared to Tommy Archer, who in the story was also charged with criminal damage after he attacked a field of GM crops, and who also prepared a similar successful defence.