BITTER HARVEST FOR MIDLAND GROWERS

It took just ten minutes to sell all the vegetables in Smithfield Market, Evesham, yesterday:  ten minutes to auction the sparse collection of produce plucked with numbed fingers from the snow or hacked laboriously from the unyielding soil.

Meanwhile, the men with frozen fields and frozen incomes, and nothing for the market, anxiously watched the thaw spread across the Vale of Evesham.