U.S. farmers, who have spent the last year grappling with tariff shocks and shrinking margins, now face another blow to their operations.
The de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz has fertilizer prices surging, complicating the already strained decisions U.S. farmers are making on the cusp of planting season.
“You’ve got the usual tension, you’ve got the added tension of fertilizer and trade, and you’ve got the perhaps more crucial context of, margins are very poor,” Seth Meyer, a former chief economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told Fortune. “A bad decision this year could be pretty costly.”
About one-third of global seaborne fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz, where Persian Gulf nations export nearly half of the world’s urea and 30% of its ammonia—key plant nutrients. Threats to that shipping route have pushed prices up roughly 30% between late February and early March, according to the Fertilizer Institute.
Certain crops rely on fertilizer more than others, namely corn, which accounts for 95% of the total grain and feed grown in the U.S., per USDA data. The exorbitant prices of fertilizer may force some farmers to pivot some of their acres away from corn and instead grow more crops that rely less on added nutrients, such as soybeans, said Meyer, who now serves as director of the University of Missouri’s Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute. President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act outlines subsidies for crops like wheat, corn, and soybeans that may also sway which crops farmers choose to grow.
While many farmers have already purchased fertilizer, others are now faced with the challenging decision of whether to purchase more at a higher price, or take the risk of producing more of a crop that is already at a surplus with rock-bottom prices.
“The chunk of the fertilizer has already been pre-purchased, but not all of it,” Meyer said. “This just adds to the tension on producers’ decision-making when they go into the field this year, if they don’t have all of their fertilizer needs booked.”
A trying time for farmers
Soaring fertilizer prices add yet another variable to farmers’ ongoing battle against razor-thin margins. Since 2022, corn prices are down nearly 50% and soybeans 40%, while fertilizer and pesticide costs have barely eased—leaving corn farmers losing 85 cents per bushel, according to the National Corn Growers Association.
As a result, farm bankruptcies have been on the rise, reaching 315 Chapter 12 filings in 2025, according to an American Farm Bureau Federation report published in February, a 46% increase from the 216 filings in 2024.
Part of that strain traces back to Trump administration tariffs, which added nearly $1 billion in costs on fertilizers, chemicals, machinery, and seeds between February and October 2025, according to North Dakota State University’s Agricultural Trade Monitor. The levies also squeezed soybean exports by effectively pricing American farmers out of the global market, though the U.S. still shipped 12 million tons to China as promised.
These recent pressures likely caused farmers to delay fertilizer orders, as they waited to see if prices eased or new aid programs were announced, Scott Stiles, extension agricultural economics program associate for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, told Fortune.
“A significant number of producers were delaying input purchases, either waiting to see if they got financing for 2026 or waiting for renewal of a working capital line for cash flow,” Stiles said. “That was a factor that delayed decisions about locking-in 2026 inputs.”
To be sure, Trump announced in December a $12 billion bailout plan to cushion farmers impacted by higher input costs and fewer export opportunities as a result of the tariffs. (USDA opened the enrollment period for this on February 23, 2026, with a deadline of April 17, 2026.)
Echoes of the war in Ukraine
Some of the challenges farmers faced also predated Trump’s second term. In February 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, oil and fertilizer prices similarly spiked because Russia accounts for about 20% of the global fertilizer trade.
But this time, disruptions could be even more severe. The NDSU Center for Agricultural Policy and Trade Studies noted in its latest report that the Persian Gulf accounts for a larger share of the global fertilizer trade than Russia. Moreover, farmers were able to offset some increased input costs as a result of a spike in grain prices because of the disruptions in the Black Sea region, the world’s breadbasket. Because Iran is not a major grain producer, grain crop prices will likely remain low, giving farmers few options to recoup costs.
Even if the war in Iran is short-lived, the consequences of the conflict will linger, according to Ryan Loy, assistant professor and extension economist for the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture. He pointed to a “rocket and feather” pattern that input costs follow after a disruptive event.
“When prices react, they go up like a rocket, but they are very slow to correct and come down like a feather,” Loy told Fortune. “This is all contributing to a kind of vicious circle that farmers are caught in.”
