A farmer from Baarlo in Limburg province has dumped a million bell peppers on a field to rot because they have been damaged by the summer’s drought.

Most of his harvest has been lost because the peppers have marks on their skin, caused by the lack of water, grower Erik Gubbels says. The lost harvest will cost him some €70,000 he told local broadcaster Limburg1.

The Kromkommer (bent cucumber) organisation, which campaigns against the dumping of fruit and vegetables which do not meet supermarket standards, says it is shocked by the dumping. ‘But it is not the grower’s fault, it is the fault of the system,’ the organisation said on Facebook.

The local authority was not pleased that 200,000 kilos of paprikas had been dumped and urged the farmer to plough them in. This he has now done, Limburg1 said.

There have been several other cases of farmers being left with fruit and veg which does not meet supermarket standards because of the drought this summer.

A plum farmer from Zeeland faced with having 60,000 kilos of plums rejected by Dutch supermarkets because they are three milimetres too small, managed to sell his crop after going public.

In August, a tomato grower who could not sell his crop to supermarkets and shops donated them instead to Instock, which uses rejected fruit and vegetables and surplus meat and fish on its menus.

Instock ended up giving most of the crop away because there were too many to process.

Growers have also sounded the alarm at the size of this season’s potatoes. Chips are set to shrink in size because the potatoes are up to 40% smaller than normal.