Fears stalk Anglo American's Yorkshire mine after BHP's takeover tilt

Andrew Weston has called the rolling hills of the North York Moors home for 75 years. His 180-acre farm (a small plot, in his book) grows crops and is home to nearly 200 cattle in several enormous barns, next to a swimming pool-sized drum of their slurry.

But the lifelong farmer is also sitting on a potential goldmine. Or at least, a potential fertiliser mine. Howlett Hall farm sits about a mile above a seam of polyhalite — a mixture of minerals that investors hope will be a lucrative alternative to conventional fertilisers made from potash.

A ten-minute tractor ride away is the portal of a mine called Woodsmith, a mindboggling £9 billion project being developed to extract enough polyhalite to spur on the