GoKawiilFarmers are very busy in the spring, under pressure to get crops into the ground just as the Northern Hemisphere begins to thaw. But this year has been different for many, thanks in large part to the escalating war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow channel, approximately 30 miles wide at its tightest point, between the Omani Musandam Peninsula and Iran. Roughly half of fertilizer feedstock exports — the various raw materials used to make fertilizer like urea, ammonia, sulfur, hydrogen, natural gas, and nitrogen — come through the Strait. And about roughly half of the world’s food production relies on fertilizer, according to Veronica Nigh, chief economist at The Fertilizer Institute. It’s vital to the food supply both in the US and around the globe.
Around a quarter of US farmers did not lock in fertilizer prices last fall, and many are now scrambling to cover costs stemming from a war they didn’t anticipate. Every day the Strait remains closed or restricted, it causes the five-plus-week crisis to extend further into the Northern Hemisphere’s vital spring planting season.
“This is a slow-moving food crisis in the making,” David Ortega, an agricultural economist and professor at Michigan State University, said. According to the International Fresh Produce Association, the fertilizer shock could cause everything from a 1- to 3-percent increase in grocery store food prices to fresh food shortages around the world.
A crop duster spreads a mixture of urea and ammonium sulfate fertilizer over a corn field in Glendora, Mississippi, on Wednesday, April 8, 2026. Rory Doyle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The fertilizer cycle
Last week, the US and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire, contingent on Iran reopening the crucial waterway to shipping traffic. Within 24 hours, however, Iran closed the strait again, citing Israeli strikes on Lebanon that Tehran says violate the terms of the deal. As of April 9th, no ships are moving freely through the waterway, and the terms of the ceasefire are in active dispute.
This is leading to a growing anxiety among the nation’s farmers. “If you have a calendar that you have always followed for planting season, you just basically have to throw that thing out the window, because everything has just had a bomb dropped on it,” said Andy DeVries of DeVries Farm, one of the co-owners of a 1,200-acre soybean and corn farm in Iowa. “There’s just not much wiggle room, and you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.”
DeVries says he and his brother, a co-owner of the farm, order around 80 to 85 tons of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer each year, locking in prices in August, ahead of the spring. Today, he says that the price of nitrogen fertilizer has risen by more than 35 percent locally, while the price of phosphorus fertilizer has increased by 19 percent.
“If you have a calendar that you have always followed for planting season, you just basically have to throw that thing out the window.” — Andy DeVries, farmer
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