James Cox counts himself lucky. The owner of a 687-acre farm in Gloucestershire, a bucolic county in the southwest of England known for its quaint villages and rolling landscape, bought all his fertilizer for the 2022 planting year well before the recent surge in prices—meaning he had enough to feed his wheat and oats, as well as the barley that’s just sprouting. And he doesn’t intend to use it all. “We are already considering reducing to some extent how much fertilizer we put on this year’s crop so we have some left over for next year,” Cox says, citing soaring prices for synthetic nutrients . He’s trying to calculate exactly how far he can stretch his reserve without compromising the quality and quantity […]