Amid world pressure from heatwaves and fertiliser shortages, billionaire’s business has invested in circular farming and biomethane
There is a distinctive smell of cow manure in the air at the Duke of Westminster’s dairy farm near Chester. It is a world away from the collection of grand West End properties controlled by the duke that form the backbone of his near £10bn fortune, a decade on from becoming Britain’s youngest billionaire.
As part of his 349-year-old Grosvenor empire, Lea Manor Farm on the duke’s Eaton Estate in north-west England has fared better than most dairy farms in recent years.
But it has also been hit by declining milk prices and other challenges faced by British farmers. A series of heatwaves causing drought, with a fifth looming this week – combined with fertiliser shortages triggered by the Iran war, diseases and a scarcity of workers since Brexit – have made farming very difficult.
Milk prices are cyclical; higher farm-gate prices in the UK last year encouraged an expansion of production, and oversupply in the UK and overseas has led to price reductions of up to 50% this year, according to Mark Roach, the managing director of Grosvenor Farms. “I can’t imagine any other industries suffering a 50% reduction.”
Lea Manor has been an arable and livestock farm for centuries, with a focus on potatoes between 1984 and 2002, when it switched to cows after the realisation that growing potatoes on the heavy Cheshire clay was not sustainable.
The farm at Eaton Estate, which is part of Grosvenor’s sprawling portfolio of offices, shops, homes, woods and farmland, has 77 staff and 2,600 Holstein friesian cows; it produces more than 34m litres of milk a year – 13,200 litres a cow – and supplies Müller and Tesco. It is surrounded by fields where animal feed such as wheat, maize, barley and rye is grown, set in 4,685 hectares (11,577 acres) of land.
This year’s heatwaves – supercharged by the escalating climate crisis – have piled more pressure on farmers. When temperatures rise above 25C, cows become more lethargic, eat less and produce less milk. At 36C during the June heatwave, each Grosvenor cow produced up to six litres less milk a day, with the heat partly mitigated by a sprinkler system and the large airy barns.
At some other farms, the milk yield was down as much as 10 litres a day for each cow, Roach says. “It’s very, very challenging for farming.”
Mark Preston, an executive trustee of Grosvenor, says: “Extreme weather in many parts of the northern hemisphere is affecting crop yields and farm economics. Farmers are adapting where they can, but the full impact is likely to become clearer over the next growing season, reinforcing the importance of building greater resilience into the UK’s food production system.”
With almost three-quarters of England and all of Wales officially in drought, wheat half the normal height and the broccoli yield down 50%, the UK is forced to import more food from countries such as Spain to avoid shortages, while global prices are rising.
Rural estates are also grappling with labour shortages post-Brexit, which has meant the flow of new eastern European workers has all but dried up.
Many British farms are lossmaking, while Lea Manor – Grosvenor’s only dairy farm – is profitable, after a big revamp starting in 2012 to improve efficiency using technology. The farming division made a profit before tax of £2.6m in 2024, down from £3.6m the previous year, with turnover of £16.2m. By contrast, Grosvenor made an underlying profit of £88.7m from its UK properties last year, up 14% on 2024. The duke received dividends of £53.7m from the group in 2025.
Despite the differing scale, Roach says that the farm is “not a hobby of the duke, it’s a commercial business”. Hugh Grosvenor is one of the UK’s richest individuals, with an estimated fortune of £9.5bn, who upon the sudden death of his father in 2016 inherited the vast estate his family has owned for centuries.
The bequest was largely shielded from 40% inheritance tax because the estate is held in a series of trusts rather than by the duke personally. Grosvenor says that it pays inheritance tax through a recurring 6% payment on the value of its assets every 10 years, instead of a single payment of 40% upon death.