When I chaired the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, I spent a lot of time listening to farmers. The concern I heard most often was the rising cost of the things they had to buy just to plant a crop: seed, fuel, equipment, and above all, fertilizer. More than a decade later, farmers are having the same conversation, except today the answers are not found in Washington or Little Rock, but in places like Beijing and the Strait of Hormuz.
American farmers are in a genuine crisis. As their input costs rise, so too must the price of what they produce, and those costs eventually land at the grocery store. So, what is really driving this?
The honest answer is not a comfortable one, because it does not lend itself to a simple domestic fix. The fertilizer crisis is a global supply chain problem, and it is being driven by two forces that any student of Economics 101 would recognize: tightened supply and unrelenting demand.
To understand how fertilizer is priced, one needs to understand there are several types of fertilizer, and that each one has its own ingredients. These ingredients are globally sourced, and, in fact, many ingredients are not produced at all in the United States. These are chemicals like sulfur, urea, nitrogen, and many others.
Sulfur is a good place to start, because it sits at the center of today's crisis. Sulfur is essential to producing phosphate fertilizer, the backbone of American row-crop agriculture. In Arkansas, sulfur is not an abstract chemistry lesson but rather a necessity. It is what helps put a rice crop in the ground in the Grand Prairie, what keeps soybean yields up in the Delta, and what our cotton and corn growers depend on season after season. Our farmers have learned the hard way that when sulfur is short or expensive, yields suffer and margins disappear.
Nothing has done more to tighten the global fertilizer market than China. As one of the world's largest fertilizer exporters, Beijing implemented export restrictions to keep both finished product and critical inputs like sulfur inside its own borders. Chinese export volumes of key fertilizer products have fallen to roughly one third of typical levels. When China pulls back at that scale, there is no equivalent substitute on the world market and every buyer, from Brazil to the Mississippi Delta, is forced to compete for a smaller pool of supply, and prices climb accordingly.
China is not alone in choking off the market and each additional restriction magnifies the squeeze Beijing set in motion. Russia, India and Indonesia are all guilty of restricting fertilizer exports under a strict domestic-first policy framework, further shrinking the pool of supply available to American growers.
Exacerbating these export controls is the ongoing crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. Approximately one-third of traded fertilizer passes through that chokepoint, along with roughly one-fifth of the world's LNG (a key nitrogen feedstock), half of the world's seaborne sulfur, and virtually all of Saudi Arabia's phosphate exports.
Adam Smith explained the underlying dynamic back in 1776, and nothing has changed. Global demand for fertilizer remains high, especially during spring planting. Meanwhile global supply has been constrained by one geopolitical crisis after another.
COVID gave us a preview of how these dynamics work. Global supply seized up, demand stayed constant, prices spiked, and it took years for producers to adapt and for prices to settle. By 2024, the USDA reported that fertilizer prices had stabilized near pre-COVID levels but warned they would remain "subject to market changes resulting from shifts in fertilizer supply, demand, and trade conditions." Those shifts arrived faster than anyone expected, and this time they are stacking on top of each other rather than resolving.
And when these shocks stack, they do not stop at the farm gate. Every disruption in the fertilizer supply chain eventually shows up as a higher price at the grocery store. We should all care about our farmers, but the more direct concern for most American families is food affordability. Since agriculture production and fertilizer components are both subject to global commodity market prices, neither is a domestic political problem with a simple domestic political solution. It is a global supply chain problem that demands clear-eyed diagnosis.
Blaming the farmer for high food prices or blaming the fertilizer companies for high fertilizer prices is like blaming the local gas station for what they must pay the wholesaler for gasoline. The farmers I have known my whole life are not looking for a bailout. They are looking for a fair market and policymakers who understand the actual problem. Americans should not misidentify the causes of price spikes. Instead, we should demand that policymakers work toward pragmatic solutions — diversifying supply sources, investing in domestic production capacity outside of vulnerable chokepoints, strengthening trade relationships with reliable partners, and building the kind of international coordination on food and fertilizer security that the severity of this moment requires.
