Low Fertilizer Costs Help Producers' Bottom Lines, Execs Expect Price Increase

Feb 23, 2017

Fertilizer prices have climbed since hitting recent lows last fall, but prices are still down enough to put a dent in corn production costs compared with a year ago.

Executives at fertilizer companies have been telling investors that rising prices point to higher returns for them in coming months.

For corn planted on the past season's soybean ground, one USDA report showed fertilizer costs at $162 in 2012 is down to $95 in 2016 and projected at $86 for 2017, said Charles Brown, an Iowa State Extension farm management specialist in eastern Iowa.

He said retail urea prices slid from around $400 per ton in January 2016 to $320 in November.

"It has started to trend up now" to around $360 in January, Brown said, and is likely to rise a little more in spring.

Fertilizer company executives have sounded optimistic about strong global demand and rising prices for their products.

Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan, which markets all three major plant nutrients, said the average nitrogen price of $182 per ton it received in the fourth quarter of 2016 had dropped from $288 a year earlier.

PotashCorp execs said they expect some seasonal price strength for nitrogen products, but new U.S. production facilities likely will weigh on domestic prices. They expect potash prices to rise, as farmers replenish soils after last year's record yields.

Mosaic Co., said its average fourth-quarter 2016 diammonium phosphate selling price of $317 per metric ton in the quarter was down from $410 a year ago.

But James O'Rourke, Mosaic president and CEO, told investment analysts Feb. 7, "potash and phosphate prices continue to move up, even through the seasonally-slow time of the year."

He said blend-grade potash prices in North America had gained more than $50 per ton from last year's lows, and New Orleans phosphate base prices were up $35 per metric ton from the December low.

In world markets during the first week of February, prices rose for diammonium phosphate, continued a steep increase for monoammonium phosphate and rose for potash after staying in a range since October, Market Realist reported.

In Iowa, prices for major nitrogen fertilizer products since September reached their lows in early October, according to USDA Market News Service reports. Those reports show statewide cash prices, bulk f.o.b. distributor.

Prices for anhydrous ammonia, urea and 32 percent liquid nitrogen rose to recent highs in late December or early January and weakened a little since then.

Monoammonium phosphate and potash prices reached their recent low in late November, and their recent highs in mid-January, according to the USDA.

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Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”