{"id":515775,"date":"2026-04-06T12:03:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T12:03:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/515775\/"},"modified":"2026-04-06T12:03:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T12:03:11","slug":"iran-wars-shock-waves-threaten-englands-farms-6000-miles-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/515775\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran war’s shock waves threaten England’s farms 6,000 miles away"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019 drive east of London.<\/p>\n

It grows mainly onions and potatoes, supplying industry giants such as McDonald\u2019s and Tesco, Britain\u2019s largest supermarket chain. It also plants sugar beets, cereals and willow trees, whose fibrous wood is used to make cricket bats.<\/p>\n

NBC News visited the farm on an overcast morning this Thursday. It sits just outside Colchester, which claims to be the country\u2019s oldest town and was the Romans\u2019 first capital in Britain.<\/p>\n

Today, the farm\u2019s maze of tracks, rolling fields and water meadows are near a government-protected \u201cArea of Outstanding Natural Beauty.\u201d 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\u2019s ideal vision of itself.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s largest 10% of farms.<\/p>\n

The war has prompted an uncomfortable realization for its chairman, John Rix, an affable farmer and businessman in fleece and a checked shirt.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou think, hang on a minute, this isn\u2019t going to add up,\u201d he said while giving an impromptu tour of his 6,500 acres in a muddy 4×4.<\/p>\n

\"RixRix Farms chairman John Rix.Andrew Testa for NBC News<\/p>\n

\u201cThere does come a point where you have to go back to your customers and say, \u2018Look \u2014\u201d he said. He trails off but the implication is clear: Prices will have to rise.<\/p>\n

That means people doing their weekly grocery shopping will end up footing part of the bill, as they did after Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine in 2022<\/a>. (U.K. food inflation topped out at 19.1% in March 2023, but is currently back down at 3.3%.)<\/p>\n

\u201cSuddenly you\u2019ve got this horrible inflation figure,\u201d he said, playing out the consequences of this upheaval. \u201cThe economic cost across the globe is already fantastic, absolutely fantastic.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s costs this year, he said. Rix believes they are covered for this year\u2019s fertilizer, but if the conflict and blockade drags on much longer, this will become another pain point when they buy next year\u2019s supply in October.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wake up each morning thinking, \u2018It\u2019s got to be over,\u2019\u201d said Rix, who at 68 says he is all but retired, his son Sam, 35, now managing director. \u201cBut so far it hasn\u2019t been.\u201d<\/p>\n

That morning, he rose to find that President Donald Trump claimed overnight he was going to bomb Iran \u201cback to the Stone Age.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not very statesmanlike is it?\u201d said Rix with a sigh.<\/p>\n

Asked for comment on the farmers’ criticisms, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said that the \u201cadministration’s detailed planning process\u201d meant it was \u201cwas prepared” for any action taken by Iran.<\/p>\n

Trump knew \u201cIran would try to stop the freedom of navigation\u201d and \u201che has taken action to destroy over 40 minelaying vessels,\u201d Kelly said. \u201cThe President is confident that the Strait will be opened very soon, and he has been clear about the consequences if it is not.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do think about it all the time,\u201d said Michael Bloomfield, 37, another \u201cfighter pilot\u201d tractor driver.<\/p>\n

\"MichaelMichael Bloomfield, a 37-year-old tractor driver for Rix Farms.Andrew Testa for NBC News<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the field needs a second pass, I\u2019m thinking, \u2018Well that\u2019s going to cost X amount more to go over again,\u2019\u201d he said, wearing a high-visibility tunic and black baseball cap.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Unlike oil, fertilizer is not generally backed by large strategic public stockpiles that can be rapidly released in a crisis. It\u2019s only needed for a few specific months of the year, so it\u2019s usually sold and shipped quickly as needed. It is also not easy to store, and some of it can explode \u2014 like the ammonia nitrate blast that rocked Beirut in August 2020.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The chaos is already creeping into the balance sheet of large businesses like P.G. Rix Farms, which employs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":515776,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-515775","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/515776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}