Rain jeopardises farmer's produce

Staff are two-and-a-half weeks behind their schedule

A south Derbyshire farmer who struggled to survive a drought now says his livelihood is at risk because of the prolonged spell of wet weather.

In April, market farmers Barrow Growers had to irrigate young lettuces with water drawn from the River Trent after six weeks without rain.

But now the rain has wiped out 10 acres of Peter Hunt's lettuce crop.

He is worried that - with more rain forecast - he could lose hundreds of thousands of pounds in produce.

Mr Hunt said they were two-and-a-half weeks behind schedule because they were having problems finding a dry area to plant in.

The fields are too saturated for machinery so staff are having to weed them by hand and new lettuces grown in poly-tunnels are beginning to wilt because they cannot be transferred to the wet fields.

"I'll be looking at around a two to three thousand pound loss, that's a rough guess at the moment. It's depending upon what the season carries on like," Mr Hunt said.

"It's gone from one extreme to the other and now it's making us really struggle because we cannot get on to do the jobs."