Fertiliser shortages will have ‘dramatic’ effect on global food prices, warns farming boss
Fertiliser shortages caused by the Iran war have driven up costs for UK farmers by up to 70% and will have a “dramatic” impact on food prices globally next year, according to one of Britain’s most powerful property and farming companies.Mark Preston, executive trustee of the 349-year-old Grosvenor Group, controlled by the Duke of Westminster, said fertiliser “was already quite expensive” before the 50% to 70% surge in prices since the start of the Iran war in late February.The effective closure of the strait of Hormuz – which Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Wednesday could soon reopen – has throttled global supplies of fertiliser, crucial to growing food crops.Preston said that, although UK crops were unlikely to be affected this year as most fertiliser had already been used, the knock-on effect could arrive next year.“Farmers are not buying that fertiliser, they’re sitting on their hands and hoping things will improve, which they probably won’t,” he said.
The multibillion-pound company owns one of the UK’s leading farms – a dairy and arable holding in Cheshire, England – as well as rural estates in Lancashire and Scotland plus swathes of Mayfair and Belgravia in central London.In Cheshire, the company produces millions of litres of milk for customers including Tesco and Müller from the sprawling Eaton estate, where the Duke of Westminster has traditionally resided, since the 1400s.“It’s going to be a very, very dramatic problem for the world, not just the UK in terms of food, just because so much fertiliser comes through those straits,” Preston said.“But farmers can probably do more spring cropping next year rather than winter cropping.So they’ve got a little bit more flexibility.
”The magnitude of the increase in food prices will depend on when the strait of Hormuz, an important shipping passage where about 1,600 vessels are stranded, opens again.Preston said: “The concern is at least as much, if not more, around food and fertiliser than it is around oil, because there are alternative sources of oil.There aren’t very many alternative sources of nitrogen, for the production of fertiliser.”The strait’s closure has cut off flows of liquefied natural gas, an important input for nitrogen-based fertilisers such as urea.The impact on Grosvenor will be limited, Preston added, because the organisation does not use much fertiliser and relies on cow dung, where possible.
His remarks came a few days after the head of the world’s largest fertiliser company Yara International warned that the war in the Middle East could cause food shortages and price rises in some of Africa’s poorest and most vulnerable communities,Research by Opinium this week found that 80% of Britons are worried about the rising price of groceries, which stems from retailers passing on cost increases to consumers,Grosvenor posted an 18% decrease in underlying profits to £70,5m last year, affected by its North American operations,Its UK property business remained a bright spot, however, with 97% occupancy; its biggest project ever, the revamp of South Molton Street in central London including offices, shops, a hotel and 33 homes near Oxford Street, which is due to be completed next year.
Owned by the duke, Hugh Grosvenor, 35 – one of Britain’s richest men with an estimated wealth of £9.56bn and godfather to Prince George – the company has an ambition to build 700 social homes in north-west England.So far, 69 have been constructed near Chester and Ellesmere Port, with a further 120 to be built this year.The group paid out dividends of £53.7m to the duke’s family and its trusts, up from £52.
4m in 2024,Grosvenor paid total taxes of £248m, against £107,4m in 2024, including £200m in the UK,This is largely because of UK property sales, which increased personal taxes on income and gains by £61m and corporate income tax payments by £71,9m.
Grosvenor has been investing more in flexible office space, and last week started work on its first directly managed flexible workspace outside London, in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.James Raynor, chief executive of the company’s property arm, said about 23% of its offices in London were flexible workspace, and “well over 90% occupied, so it’s performing very well”.
Fears for spears: how to cook asparagus without blanching | Kitchen aide
I always blanch asparagus, but how else can I cook it?Joe, via email“Blanching captures that green, verdant nature of asparagus so well, and saves its minerality, too,” agrees Bart Stratfold of Timberyard in Edinburgh, but when the season is going full tilt, it’s just common sense to expand our horizons. For Billy Stock, chef/owner of the Wellington in Margate, that means salads, especially with spears that are really fresh: “Use a peeler to shave thin strips off the raw asparagus, and use them in a delicious variation on salade Niçoise.”Another approach would be the grill, Stratfold says: “Coat the spears in rapeseed oil, then grill on an excruciatingly high heat for just a few seconds, until they develop some char.” After that, he rolls them in a tray of vinegar or preserves: “At the restaurant, that’s usually sweet pickled elderflower and elderflower vinegar.”Joe could even abandon the kitchen altogether
Georgina Hayden’s quick and easy recipe for spanakopita orzo | Quick and easy
For me, it isn’t really spring until the first May bank holiday; the days are longer, the flowers are out, and an abundance of green graces our shelves. This spanakopita orzo is a celebration of all things light, bright and spring. It’s a great weeknight dinner that will instantly transport you to Greece.This dish should be oozy, like a good risotto, so if your orzo absorbs all the stock, add a little more hot water to give it that requisite creamy finish.Prep 15 minCook 25 min Serves 425g butter 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra to serve1 bunch spring onions, trimmed and sliced2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely sliced220g baby leaf spinach, chopped1
Spring soup and bean and cheese quesadillas: Thomasina Miers’ Mexican-inspired seasonal recipes
I have always loved the evident (though not proven) link between how foodie a country is and its love of soups. In Mexico, where nose-to-tail eating is a given, broths maintain a steadying presence in any self-respecting cantina, and soups are commonplace on most menus. We don’t eat a crazy amount of meat at home, but having homemade stock in the freezer is an ingenious fast track to flavour and goodness. Here, whether your stock is chicken or vegetable, homemade or shop-bought, the joy is in the gentle spicing, a scattering of herbs, zingy tomatillos and some lovely spring leaves.There are so many different herbs in Mexico that are impossible to find here, so I’ve used bundles of more common soft herbs to try to capture the lovely breadth of flavour in this soup
How to make the perfect Spanish broad bean stew – recipe | Felicity Cloake's How to make the perfect …
I always feel sorry for broad beans, the lumpy cousin perpetually overshadowed by the charms of slender, elegant asparagus and sweet, bouncy, little peas. They’re in season at roughly the same time, but asparagus in particular gets all the glory, perhaps because so many of us are scarred by childhood experiences of large, grey wrinkly beans served in a floury white sauce (my own parents are so averse to the things that I vividly remember the first time I came across them on a Sunday roast as a teenager and had to ask a friend what they were).The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more
‘We don’t want to make the same mistakes’: Jamie’s Italian reopens in London
Jamie Oliver’s head of restaurants is optimistic about new recipe of smaller site, slimmed-down menu and no burgersWhen Jamie’s Italian crashed and burned in 2019, with the company in £83m of debt and causing 1,000 job losses, no one imagined the celebrity chef would try again.But seven years later, Jamie Oliver has opened a flagship site under the same name in Leicester Square in central London, and believes he has a new recipe for success: a smaller restaurant with a slimmed-down menu, which features cheaper cuts of meat and no burgers.At its peak the chain, which opened in 2008, had 47 UK restaurants. Now it just has the one.Ed Loftus, the global director of Jamie Oliver Restaurants, has worked with Oliver for 20 years and is charged with making the reopening a success
Willy’s, Margate, Kent: ‘It chortles in the face of small plates’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants
This cute and jovial eatery is reason enough to make a break for the coastAs summer looms, and with it the urge to stampede towards the edges of Britain in search of paddling opportunities, I proffer another coastal dining idea: Willy’s in Margate – and, yes, that name does have about it something of the naughty seaside postcard. Tucked away in the back of Margate House hotel on Dalby Square, a few minutes’ walk from the seafront, Willy’s is a blur of frilly red-and-pink seaside adorableness. It’s cool, cute and jovial, with pork scratchings and apple chutney on the menu, as well as black pudding scotch eggs, sticky toffee pudding and Sunday lunches of beef rump and baked cauliflower cheese. This menu is short, intentional and hearty, rather than airy-fairy, and it chortles in the face of small plates.But, for the foodie/sippy crowd, the signifiers are all here: there’s a paper plane and a penicillin on the cocktail menu, throwbacks to New York’s iconic Milk and Honey bar
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