By Lela Nargi
As of this writing at the end of the first week of March 2026, millions of gallons of nitrogen and other fertilizer exports originating in the Middle East are stranded at the top of the Strait of Hormuz, as the U.S. and Israel bomb Iran. Some of this supply should by now have been making its way to the U.S., where farmers in the top corn– and soybean-producing states of the Midwest are getting ready to kickstart a new planting season by applying nitrogen to their cornfields — some of which will leach out into waterways and aquifers. The fertilizer backlog arrives on top of already-high fertilizer prices and increasing stress as farmers continue to absorb a year’s worth of negative effects from tariffs, fewer markets to sell their crops into, and low crop prices. And it has likely left many of them thinking about ways to reduce their need for costly fertilizer — or at least, keep more of it on their land.
A much smaller sub-group of about 200 corn and soy farmers, though, is a big step ahead of this pack; by adding a third crop of oats to their planting rotations, they are well-suited to weather this input-related ordeal. Calling themselves the Oat Mafia, six years back the group’s founders set out simply to share knowledge and resources with each other about growing food-grade oats. They wound up solving a different problem related to nitrogen fertilizer: its deleterious impacts on drinking water. In mostly southern Wisconsin, southeast Minnesota and large swaths of Iowa — all heavily invested in conventional corn and soybean farming — wells and surface waters test far above the safe limit of 10 milligrams per liter for nitrate, which has been linked to blue baby syndrome, colorectal cancer and thyroid disease.
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