The maddening part of today’s fertilizer crush is not the steep price spikes that hit U.S. farmers immediately after the Trump administration went to war with Iran on Feb. 28.
Nor is it that about 70% of the more than 5,700 farmers polled by Farm Journal magazine in mid-April say they “are unable to afford the fertilizer they need this season amid rising input costs due to the war.”
It’s not even the willful ignorance of Trump’s circle to Iran’s go-to move to close the Strait of Hormuz. That spigot controls the flow of the world’s largest amount of urea and ammonia and the second-largest amount of diammonium phosphate (DAP) and monoammonium phosphate (MAP), as noted by our friends at farmdoc Daily.
The most maddening part is this: Having lit the barn on fire by going to war without any idea of the chaos and carnage it would unleash, the White House and its U.S. Department of Agriculture appointees now say they are riding to the rescue with a bucket of warmed-over ideas that are too little and too tired to have any appreciative impact on the U.S. fertilizer front for years, if ever.
But don’t mention that to USDA Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins who told a House Appropriations subcommittee on April 16 that the Trump administration is “poised to dip into tens of billions of dollars from tariffs and trade deal renegotiations to strengthen domestic fertilizer supplies,” according to Agri-Pulse.
What “tens of billions … from tariffs”? According to the April 20 New York Times, the White House “took its first steps toward returning more than $166 billion from tariffs that were struck down in February.” The booty, by law, must be returned to tariff payers, not gifted to the global fertilizer cartel to fund U.S. expansion.
And what “trade deal renegotiations” are about to yield billions to be ticketed for the stuffed pockets of transnational fertilizer companies to subsidize their North American operations?
And stuffed pockets is an understatement.
According to Market Research Reports, the global fertilizer industry had a collective, 2024 value between $195 billion and $210 billion. Only two American companies, number three Mosaic and number eight CF Industries, made this fertilizer top 10. The other players were, by rank, Canadian, Norwegian, Moroccan, Swiss, Israeli, Russian, Chilean and German.
Despite the secretary of agriculture’s implied assistance to the fertilizer gang, its biggest American player, Mosaic, has stuck to its early-April decision to shutter two Brazilian phosphate plants that effectively removes a million tons of annual fertilizer from the global market.
The shutdown angered Deputy Agriculture Secretary Stephen Vaden who told a gathering of ag reporters on April 13 that if “You take a million tons of supply out of the international market, that affects the price worldwide.”
And, Vaden noted, adding a second blinding glimpse of the obvious, “It will only lead to one thing – higher prices.”
Welcome to the price-taking, never price-making world of American farmers and ranchers, sir, where antitrust is more a legal concept than a legal fact. For decades, farmers and ranchers have been begging antitrust officials for probes into concentrated industries like meatpacking, seed, fertilizer, machinery and grain merchandising.
The result? Crickets.
Recent events at the Department of Justice don’t inspire much hope. In February, the head of DOJ’s antitrust division, Gail Slater, resigned – others say she was pushed – barely a year into her job. That followed the firing of two of her deputies late in 2025. And her boss, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, was cashiered April 2.
So, keep talking, Agriculture Secretary Rollins and Deputy Secretary Vaden. At least it’s cheap; little else in rural America is.
This article originally appeared on Farmers Advance: Bet on fertilizer cartel, not the disorganized DOJ or late-coming USDA
Reporting by Alan Guebert, Farmers’ Advance / Farmers Advance
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
