Chatteris farmer sees 300 tonnes of sugar beet perish due to wet winter

Farmer George Munns said it was the wettest winter he had ever seen

A farmer said about 300 tonnes (661,00lb) of sugar beet perished after the wet winter left a field under water for nearly five months.

George Munns, 62, from Chatteris, Cambridgeshire, said he had "never seen a year as wet as this".

British Sugar, the sole producers of sugar beet in the UK, extended its factory opening times to accommodate late harvests.

Its spokesman said it had been a "very difficult season" for farmers.

Mr Munns had expected a yield of 700 tonnes (1,543,000lb) from the worst affected field, with the loss amounting to about 10% of his sugar beet crop.

He had planted 172 acres (70 hectares) of sugar beet on his 1,000 acre (404 hectare) arable farm.

"There's a big area of the field that's gone so wet the crop's gone rotten and if we sent it into the factory they'd be rejected," he said.

"I've been crawling around this planet for 62 years and I've never seen a year and weather as wet as this, not continuously, starting in October and finishing about a fortnight ago.

"It'll probably mean it'll make enough money to pay the rent on the field, but not make a profit, but hey that's farming."

The worst affected field was under water for between four to five months

Rob Wise, environment adviser for the National Farmers Union (NFU) East, said Mr Munns' situation this winter was "not unusual, unfortunately".

He said: "We've had a series of major storms over the last winter and we've had continuous rainfall between those storms so we've got many farmers affected, creating overtopping of rivers or inundation of the coast.

"Then we've got farmers who may not have experienced flooding, but they've suffered so much inundation with rain that they just haven't been able to get onto the land at all."

'Difficult season'

British Sugar said it processed about eight million tonnes of the crop and up to 1.2m tonnes of sugar each year.

The sugar producer worked in partnership with 2,300 growers including Mr Munns.

Daniel Green, agriculture director for British Sugar said it had been a "very difficult season" for sugar beet farmers.

"We have extended the number of days [at British Sugar factories] available for the delivering and processing of the crop by over 50 days," he said.

Despite the wet weather however, he added that the year had offered "above average yields".