Fertilizer prices are up, but grain prices are too
U.S. farmers are experiencing different sentiments stemming from the conflict in Iran.
Since the fighting began on Feb. 28, commodity prices have increased, providing farmers with opportunities to make sound marketing decisions.
“I was doing the farmer happy dance,” Dave Kestel, a cash crop producer from near New Lenox, Ill., told Reuters.
This is because he sold almost half of the 2025 harvest that he’d been paying storage fees for. And he’s already sold about 10 percent of the crops he plans to harvest in 2026.
Other farmers took advantage of the higher prices too.
Keaton Lyons from Rensselaer, Ind., has contracted more than half of his 2026 crop.
“Pricewise, I feel really good,” he told Reuters. “The thing that I’m nervous about is we don’t have a kernel in the ground and we’re 65 percent sold.”
On the other hand, farmers are concerned about the increased input costs.
Since the conflict in Iran started, shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping lane situated between Iran, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates which handles about 35 percent of global fertilizer, including 50 percent of the world’s urea, has come to a halt.
Fuel prices are up too.
And these unavoidable costs will be felt at the farm gate.
“The tractor gets started every day. That skid steer gets started every day. The buyers of our products, whether it’s corn, soybeans, beef, poultry or milk, that all consumes diesel or gas,” Darin Von Ruden, president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, told News8.
Some growers are making tough choices when it comes to the fertilizers they do apply.
Lance Lillibridge, who raises corn and cattle in Vinton, Iowa., told CBS he’s omitting phosphorous from his fields this year because it’s too expensive.
“I think we can probably get away with that for a year but if this goes on and we continue to not be able to afford this fertilizer, our yields are going to go down,” he said.
The totality of the conflict in the Middle East and its implications on U.S. agriculture mean every decision could be crucial.
In an interview with Fortune, Seth Meyer, a former USDA chief economist, said farmers are working within a fragile landscape.
“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,” he said. “A bad decision this year could be pretty costly.”