Nitrogen costs highlight the need for strategic vision and farm resilience
For British farmers, conflict in the Middle East and the disruption to global energy and commodity flows has translated into a practical and immediate problem: the cost of nitrogen fertiliser has surged sharply. This has loaded greater pressure onto an agricultural sector that’s already stretched and struggling.
But the question is not simply whether government should step in with support - instead, we need to ask, what kind of support, for whom, and in service of what longer-term vision?
These questions were the subject of a Farm Gate podcast conversation between ffinlo Costain (Editor, 8point9.com), Joe Stanley (Head of Sustainable Farming, The GWCT Allerton Project) and Nikki Yoxall (Farmer and Technical Director, Pasture for Life).
Already on the edge
To understand why the current fertiliser price spike is so damaging, it helps to understand just how precarious the position of British farming — and particularly English farming — already is.
Unlike Scotland and Wales, England has now removed all of its old area-based support payments, the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) that was primarily designed to manage income volatility. At precisely the moment those buffers have been stripped away, English farmers are facing a triple threat: extreme weather events compressing yields, commodity prices at historic lows, and now a spike in input costs. One recent industry analysis found that farm input cost inflation has risen by around 42% over just the last four seasons.
The contrast with international competitors is important. Across North America and continental Europe, farming sectors that already benefit from generous baseline support are receiving additional emergency assistance to weather the current crisis — in Europe, the EU has temporarily relaxed state-aid rules, enabling member states to offer up to €50,000 in emergency support to farmers, if they choose to. British farmers, by and large, are being left to absorb the shock alone.
Is a nitrogen subsidy needed?
It is tempting to frame the response to the fertiliser crisis as a simple binary: subsidise or don’t subsidise. But that framing obscures as much as it reveals.
Those who support immediate financial intervention — including the National Farmers’ Union — are not wrong that the timing is brutal. As Joe Stanley puts it, “a crisis in the middle of a growing season is not the point at which you tell farmers to just cope.” Smaller farming operations and tenant farmers, who typically lack the infrastructure or capital to pre-purchase fertiliser in bulk months ahead of time, are buying on the spot market right now and absorbing the full force of elevated prices. These are also, by and large, the farms least able to pivot quickly to alternatives.
But Nikki Yoxall offers a necessary corrective to the instinct to simply throw money at the problem. “I wouldn’t be comfortable with a long-term approach to always subsidising when the going gets tough,” she argues. “We have to step back and take a systems approach and ask how we support more farms to be more resilient, rather than going into panic mode.” Subsidising fertiliser indefinitely does nothing to reduce the underlying vulnerability that makes each new global disruption — Ukraine in 2022, the Strait of Hormuz today, whatever comes next — so damaging to British food security.
The answer, then, is that some form of short-term support is probably justified, but it must be designed as a bridge rather than a destination.
The next six months
In the immediate term, UK Government needs to acknowledge that there is a crisis. That acknowledgement has been conspicuously absent. The full withdrawal of BPS, combined with climate volatility and now a geopolitical supply shock, has pushed record numbers of farm businesses to exit the industry. Yet policy continues as though none of these pressures are real.
Short-term support need not take the form of a blanket fertiliser subsidy. A more targeted approach might consider:
Emergency income support - This might be similar to what European neighbours have already deployed, directed particularly at smaller and tenant farming operations that cannot hedge against price volatility.
Nuance about end-use - not all fertiliser applications are equal. In Scotland, for example, roughly 80% of nitrogen fertiliser is applied to grasslands — some of which could be managed differently with no loss of productivity. Support schemes should distinguish between applications that are genuinely essential for food production and those where alternatives exist right now.
Attention to the supply chain - There is a significant nitrogen surplus sitting in places like the River Wye catchment in the form of animal manure, while arable farms elsewhere are short of nutrients. Infrastructure to capture, process and redistribute that organic nutrient resource could ease supply pressure relatively quickly — and it creates rural employment in the process.
The medium term
Within two years, a great deal is possible if the policy framework supports it. The most important shift in that timeframe is knowledge-based rather than financial.
One of the clearest lessons from farmers who have successfully reduced or eliminated synthetic nitrogen is that the transition is not technically impossible, but it requires support networks.
Farmers who went “cold turkey” on nitrogen during the last price spike following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and came out the other side successfully were, almost without exception, already embedded in knowledge networks, had secure business structures and could absorb the risk of experimentation.
The farmers who are most exposed to the current crisis — smaller operations, tenants, those without financial buffers — are precisely those least able to attempt an unsupported transition. That is where government intervention has the greatest leverage: not simply paying bills, but funding communities of practice, peer learning networks, technical advisory services and demonstration farms that give more farmers the knowledge and confidence to change.
The regenerative agriculture space — where synthetic fertiliser use is significantly reduced but not necessarily eliminated — represents a vast middle ground between conventional and fully organic production.
Government support for that transition could include:
Mandatory but meaningful soil and nutrient testing, paired with requirements to act on results. Testing without action, as Scotland’s experience with its Whole Farm Plan has demonstrated, simply generates data that sits unused.
Targeted funding for organic transition, recognising that a planned shift away from synthetic nitrogen requires the organic supply chain, processing capacity and market demand to develop in parallel. You cannot remove one system without building the other.
Support for expanding domestic production of legumes and pulse crops, which fix atmospheric nitrogen naturally and are currently under-produced in UK rotations partly because domestic markets for them are underdeveloped.
Redesigning for resilience
The Strait of Hormuz crisis is not an anomaly. It is a preview. The world is becoming structurally more volatile — geopolitically, climatically and economically.
A food system that depends on globally traded synthetic nitrogen, manufactured from fossil fuels, shipped through contested waterways, is a food system that will face this crisis again and again.
The strategic response to that reality is not to make nitrogen cheaper. It is to need less of it.
Reducing dependence on synthetic nitrogen at the scale of UK agriculture requires breeding programmes for more nitrogen-efficient crop varieties, investment in biological alternatives (including improved inoculants for nitrogen-fixing bacteria), development of the organic and regenerative value chain, and a serious national conversation about diet — because a food system that produces less meat and more plant protein for direct human consumption simply requires less nitrogen to function.
None of that happens without a government that is willing to articulate a long-term vision and fund the research, infrastructure and transition support to deliver it.
The current policy environment in England, where the BPS has been removed but the Environmental Land Management schemes that were supposed to replace it remain unfocussed and underfunded, has left farmers in a planning vacuum at the worst possible time.
Don’t waste the crisis
The surge in fertiliser costs triggered by the Strait of Hormuz situation is painful. But it is also, potentially, clarifying. It exposes the fragility of a food system built on cheap fossil-fuel inputs and global supply chains that can be disrupted by events entirely beyond British control.
The right response is not to pretend the crisis isn’t happening, nor to simply subsidise the status quo. It is to provide enough immediate support to prevent farm businesses from collapsing, while investing seriously in the knowledge networks, supply chains, infrastructure and research that will make the next price shock — and there will be one — considerably less damaging.
British farming is not short of resilience. It is short of the strategic vision and institutional support that would allow that resilience to flourish.
This article is based on a conversation between ffinlo Costain (Editor, 8point9.com), Joe Stanley (Head of Sustainable Farming, The GWCT Allerton Project) and Nikki Yoxall (Farmer and Technical Director, Pasture for Life)