GREAT HORKESLEY, England — Few places feel farther from the Iran war than the potato fields of eastern England, where pastoral landscapes and ancient forests have inspired romantic painters and poets for centuries.
But this bucolic scene is not immune from the shock waves triggered by the American-Israeli assault — and it’s a story being repeated across farms all over the world.
Though much attention has been devoted to the oil shock brought on by the conflict, there is another, perhaps equally alarming crisis emerging for the global population: a looming shortage of fertilizer, which could trigger widespread food shortages.
Jumping down from his bright-green, 400-horsepower tractor, Stuart Josselyn wastes no time giving his view on geopolitics while standing on the plowed earth.
“Trumpy,” he said, using a nickname for the American president delivered with the elongated vowels of an East Anglian accent, “he is causing real problems for real people throughout the whole world.”
At 51, Josselyn is one of the farm’s top machine operators — whom his boss calls “fighter pilots” — but his chuckling manner and hoodie-sweatpants combo belie a serious message for the American president: “This is going to affect us for a long time, even if the war stops right now.”
A chorus of expert voices warned this could happen: Iran retaliating by blockading the Strait of Hormuz. This vital but narrow waterway shepherds through a fifth of the world’s crude oil and a third of its granular urea, a type of nitrogen fertilizer. Oil prices of more than $100 a barrel have been headline news for weeks. Less noticed is that future deliveries of Middle Eastern granular urea have spiraled from $484 per ton on Feb. 27 to $750 per ton as of Friday.
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Already, global food commodity prices have climbed to their highest levels since December, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said Friday. And if the conflict stretches beyond 40 days, then “farmers will have to choose” — plant less or switch to less fertilizer-intensive crops, the organization’s chief economist, Máximo Torero, said in a video Q&A. “Those choices will hit future yields and shape our food supply” this year and next, he said.
After Brexit, the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the relentless impact of the climate crisis, this is just the latest turbulence to batter the machinery of global trade. It is how one blockaded 20-mile stretch of water can create a cascade of consequences touching not just fuel and food, but medicine, electronics and the panoply of consumer goods.
For the United States and Europe, this threatens expensive groceries. For some parts of Africa, South America and Asia, it could mean acute shortages if the war lasts months rather than weeks.
The chaos is already creeping into the balance sheet of large businesses like P.G. Rix Farms, which employs around 40 people some 90 minutes’ drive east of London.
It grows mainly onions and potatoes, supplying industry giants such as McDonald’s and Tesco, Britain’s largest supermarket chain. It also plants sugar beets, cereals and willow trees, whose fibrous wood is used to make cricket bats.
NBC News visited the farm on an overcast morning this Thursday. It sits just outside Colchester, which claims to be the country’s oldest town and was the Romans’ first capital in Britain.
Today, the farm’s maze of tracks, rolling fields and water meadows are near a government-protected “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.” It is the kind of scene that stirs something deep in a certain English imagination: a landscape out of John Constable, the 19th-century Romantic painter whose work came to embody the nation’s ideal vision of itself.
This is no mom-and-pop operation, rather an empire of alliums and tubers. Rix Farms made 1.2 million pounds ($1.6 million) after taxes last year, filings show, and is among the country’s largest 10% of farms.
The war has prompted an uncomfortable realization for its chairman, John Rix, an affable farmer and businessman in fleece and a checked shirt.
“You think, hang on a minute, this isn’t going to add up,” he said while giving an impromptu tour of his 6,500 acres in a muddy 4x4.
“There does come a point where you have to go back to your customers and say, ‘Look —” he said. He trails off but the implication is clear: Prices will have to rise.
That means people doing their weekly grocery shopping will end up footing part of the bill, as they did after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. (U.K. food inflation topped out at 19.1% in March 2023, but is currently back down at 3.3%.)
“Suddenly you’ve got this horrible inflation figure,” he said, playing out the consequences of this upheaval. “The economic cost across the globe is already fantastic, absolutely fantastic.”
Rix has seen a 44% price increase for diesel fuel, which powers the machines that sow and harvest 44 fields of potatoes and around 60 fields of onions. Together with natural gas, used to dry millions of onions each week, that will add 649,000 pounds to the farm’s costs this year, he said. Rix believes they are covered for this year’s fertilizer, but if the conflict and blockade drags on much longer, this will become another pain point when they buy next year’s supply in October.
“I wake up each morning thinking, ‘It’s got to be over,’” said Rix, who at 68 says he is all but retired, his son Sam, 35, now managing director. “But so far it hasn’t been.”
That morning, he rose to find that President Donald Trump claimed overnight he was going to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age.”
“It’s not very statesmanlike is it?” said Rix with a sigh.
Asked for comment on the farmers' criticisms, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said that the “administration's detailed planning process” meant it was “was prepared" for any action taken by Iran.
Trump knew “Iran would try to stop the freedom of navigation” and “he has taken action to destroy over 40 minelaying vessels,” Kelly said. “The President is confident that the Strait will be opened very soon, and he has been clear about the consequences if it is not.”
He and his workers talk about how unnerving it feels to have their livelihoods subject to the whims of a man 3,700 miles away in the White House.
“I do think about it all the time,” said Michael Bloomfield, 37, another “fighter pilot” tractor driver.
“If the field needs a second pass, I’m thinking, ‘Well that’s going to cost X amount more to go over again,’” he said, wearing a high-visibility tunic and black baseball cap.
One silver lining he and other staffers foresee is that the public might become more aware about what it actually takes to put food on their plates.
Ultimately, all crops need nitrogen to grow. They get this either from the soil or, as with modern farming, through added fertilizer. One of the easiest ways of producing nitrogen fertilizers such as urea is by using natural gas, which the Persian Gulf has in abundance.
Unlike oil, fertilizer is not generally backed by large strategic public stockpiles that can be rapidly released in a crisis. It’s only needed for a few specific months of the year, so it’s usually sold and shipped quickly as needed. It is also not easy to store, and some of it can explode — like the ammonia nitrate blast that rocked Beirut in August 2020.
Another perverse kind of benefit that today’s farmers believe they have is becoming accustomed to a world shaped by regular upheavals, such as GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, which they believe are behind declining sales of their spuds.
“Trump adds an element of uncertainty,” said George Rix, 38, John Rix’s nephew and the managing director of the farm’s sister company Stourgarden, which packs the produce after it has been harvested. “All we can try to do is build a model that’s resilient against those changes.”
He had to shout above a warehouse full of packing machines and — installed just 18 months ago — three large robotic arms lifting heavy boxes. One line was clear above the din: “We live in an uncertain world.”
