War-Spiked Urea Prices May Prompt Increase in Soybean Acres

By Mary Hightower

As war pinches shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and drives up the cost of urea, growers are pivoting to soybeans — a crop that's not hungry for the widely used nitrogen fertilizer.

Unlike other crops, soybeans can fix nitrogen themselves, so no urea is required. However, urea is needed to grow corn, cotton and rice.

“It’s a good idea to revisit the crop enterprise budgets to look at any change in the net revenue margins for crops that require nitrogen fertilizers,” said Hunter Biram, extension agricultural economist with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. “So maybe you grow more soybeans than you originally thought you’d plant.

“We could be looking at 2017 acreage levels — over 3.5 million acres of soybeans this year,” he said.

Looking at the enterprise budgets established in the fall, “soybeans appear to be the least bad when it comes to returns,” Biram said. “We are looking at about a negative $5 per acre return on soybeans under a standard crop share agreement — and that's best-case scenario.”

The Cooperative Extension Service develops enterprise budgets each year to help farmers calculate profit or loss for the upcoming growing season, allowing growers to run multiple scenarios.

Moving toward beans

Jeremy Ross, extension soybean agronomist for the Division of Agriculture, said a colleague joked that Arkansas might have 4 million acres of soybeans this year.

“I laughed, but we may be over 3.5 million acres. That would be a 900,000-acre increase compared to 2025,” Ross said on Friday. “And 2.6 million last year was the lowest since 1960.

“It’s a good thing we don’t need urea for soybean production,” he said. “We will take all the acres we can this year.”

Scott Stiles, extension agricultural economics program associate, said even with the move toward soybeans, “growers are being offered new crop bids above $11 all around the state and growers are already making some marketing decisions on '26 crop soybeans. The lower input cost and better margins are favoring soybeans this year.”