It's not often Richard Vary considers the Swiss snow season as part of the business plan for his farm supply store on Queensland's Darling Downs.
But this year it helped him breathe a sigh of relief as Europe's record-breaking warm winter made the fertiliser he supplies cheaper.
While home gardeners and farmers will welcome the price slide, they are still likely to pay more than their international counterparts.
Analysts fear the lack of transparency in fertiliser markets means that for Australian consumers, there are no guarantees the cost of growing and buying food will follow.
Consumers and farmers pay the price
Mr Vary said he had been paying double the usual amount for the fertiliser he sold to farmers for use on their grain crops in the past year.
At $1,600 a tonne, that cost was passed on to his clients, who normally bought more than 10,000 tonnes of urea-based fertiliser a year.
"We've definitely felt it, with the price being so dear," Mr Vary said.
Prices went through the roof in March when Russia went to war in Ukraine and withheld gas supplies into the rest of Europe.
Economic analyst Andrew Whitelaw said the gas was integral to the creation of fertiliser.
"Natural gas is the feedstock for making urea [fertiliser]," he said.
"It makes sense that when we have less natural gas supplies and higher natural gas prices, then we have higher urea [fertiliser] prices."
Impact on food prices
Fertilisers play a key role in increasing crop yields, meaning farmers can grow food efficiently and supply more with less costs.
But if farmers cannot afford to use it, food supply shrinks, compounding the growing cost of living and worsening food insecurity.
It means consumers pay more but also that farmers do not earn more.
Mr Vary said producers only bought about half of the supply they would have liked to as fertiliser prices peaked.
Mr Whitelaw said there were good signs prices were improving, brought on by falling demand.
"We've seen a milder winter in Europe, which has reduced the demand for gas, combined with the fact that some people just couldn't afford it," he said.
"We're also seeing, because of the high price of gas, more cargoes of LNG going from the likes of China into Europe."
"[Australia] buys most of its fertiliser out of the Middle East, where the wholesale price now is around $645 a tonne, where this time last year it was closer to $1,100 per tonne."
Whether or not consumers would benefit though was harder to quantify.
Mr Whitelaw said wholesale fertiliser prices lacked transparency in Australia and there was no publicly available data on the difference between the global price and what was being paid in the domestic market.
"It might sit closer to the $1,000 than $700 or $800," he said.
"The big question is around how much of that global fall gets passed onto local producers."
Volatility remains
Mr Vary said the urea currently stored in his facility at Brookstead, west of Brisbane, was bought on a locked-in contract for over $1,200 a tonne.
The urea he was buying now was about $200 a tonne cheaper, which he said was a small step in the right direction.
"It's a start, but hopefully [the price fall] has got a bit more to go," he said.
With another big Eastern Australian grain crop forecast and fertiliser prices going down, Mr Vary was preparing for a potential supply shortage as growers snaped up supplies while they could.
"We're building another shed for extra urea stocks because we just won't be able to keep up with demand," he said.
"It makes life hard, but it's all just supply and demand, that's just what it is I suppose."
