President Trump’s war on Iran has introduced Americans who haven’t previously followed farm policy to a rather niche topic: fertilizer. It’s estimated that half of global food production relies on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. Gulf countries are major producers both of the finished product and of the natural gas that’s used to make it. And up to a third of the global fertilizer trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively closed since the war began in late February.
Ergo, the looming fertilizer crisis that you’ve surely heard about by now. The growing season has started in the Northern hemisphere, and the price of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is higher than it’s been in years. Seventy percent of respondents in a recent American Farm Bureau Federation survey said they can’t afford “all the fertilizer they need.” Another report suggests rising fertilizer prices are already adding an extra $35 per acre to the cost of corn production.
A bevy of recent articles have speculated about how bad this could get. Fertilizer production across the globe will be affected by the market volatility for natural gas. This will in turn raise food prices. Farmers who can’t afford to buy as much fertilizer as usual this year may produce far less crops, or go bankrupt. All of this will hit poorer nations first and hardest—with potentially devastating consequences. But the U.S. will be affected, too.
And as the conflict drags on, it’s worth asking: Does agriculture have to be this vulnerable to supply chain disruptions halfway across the world? What would it take to wean the U.S. off of natural gas–sourced fertilizer?
Some experts doubt whether it’s even possible, given the corporate interests aligned against change, the torpedoing of even the most basic, imperfect legislative coalitions needed to pass agricultural policy, and the country’s collective addiction to corn. But they also point to easily identifiable reforms—from the farms themselves to the halls of Congress—that could make American agriculture far less vulnerable, not just to wars but also climate disasters. And these ideas would also carry major environmental benefits to boot.
To understand the scale of the problem, it helps to understand why fertilizers, and particularly nitrogen fertilizers, depend so heavily on natural gas to begin with. “The core of the green revolution that allowed us to double and triple yields from an acre of land is dependent on the chemical process discovered by [German chemist] Fritz Haber back in the early part of the twentieth century,” said Lewis Ziska, who spent 24 years as a scientist with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service before his current position as an associate professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
Richard Farrell, a soil science professor at the University of Saskatchewan, explained that “you’re taking atmospheric nitrogen which has what would be called a triple bond—it’s a very stable compound—and you have to break that apart to produce ammonium nitrate or urea fertilizers.” Breaking that bond takes a lot of energy, which gets provided by natural gas—which also provides the hydrogen input needed for the chemical process. While some researchers, he noted, are trying to synthesize ammonia via a different process—something that could more plausibly be powered by solar or wind power or done on a smaller scale, even on individual farms—“you wouldn’t call it a mature science, yet.”
Not all crops require huge infusions of nitrogen. But many do. And the United States specializes in the most notoriously nitrogen-hungry crop in the world: corn. It’s the top crop in the country both by both acreage and federal subsidies, and serves as the
top source of animal feed. For optimum corn yields, the rule of thumb is that you need to apply 200 to 250 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre.
There are ways to reduce fertilizer usage, though—starting with farmers simply using less of it. “The department of agriculture in each state [has] a recommended usage of fertilizer—in this state, in our climate, in this soil, growing this crop, you should use this amount per acre,” said Lilliston. “And typically farmers go considerably over that” just to be safe, even though that exacerbates runoff and water quality problems.
Fertilizer application could also be timed more precisely. In Canada, Farrell said, the fertilizer industry, and to some extent the Canadian government, has advocated for what’s dubbed the “Four R nutrient strategy”—applying fertilizer from the Right Source (types of fertilizer tailored to the particular crop), at the Right Rate (exactly how much the crop needs), at the Right Time (looking at the plant’s life cycle), and Right Place (so, not just spread evenly over the field). The political support for this, he explained, “grew out of trying to reduce nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer and soils, because soils are the largest source of nitrous oxide, which is a really potent greenhouse gas, 300 times that of carbon dioxide.” A variety of tools for more precisely tailoring fertilizer application are under development, but many aren’t commercially available yet—and would probably require subsidies for farmers, who already operate largely on credit, to afford them.
Another way to reduce nitrogen application is via crop rotation, which a lot of American farmers already practice. “What you are seeing already is farmers saying they’re going to grow soybeans instead of corn,” Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, told me. Soybeans, which like all legumes take nitrogen from the air and “fix” it into the soil, not only require less fertilizer themselves, but can reduce the amount of fertilizer required by corn in a subsequent year. In 2022, when fertilizer prices spiked due to the Russia-Ukraine war, many farmers switched to soybeans for the year, Lilliston said. And that’s likely what some people will do this year, as well.
But a lot of farmers won’t do that, Lilliston added, either because they’ve already bought nitrogen fertilizer for the season or because they’re worried about soybean prices: Trump’s trade war has deprived American soybean farmers of their large market in China, and prices in 2025 swung wildly as tariff policies changed. “If you sold on the wrong day you could have taken a bath last year,” said Patty Lovera, a policy advisor with the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment.
In theory, crop rotation could be significantly expanded—enhancing resilience both for soil and finances. “If you add a third crop to a corn-soy rotation you start to really build soil fertility” and need fewer pesticides, said Lilliston. “Organic production is generally a five-crop rotation,” he noted, but that kind of system isn’t an option for many farmers. “They may even be really interested in adding a third crop, but they don’t have the market and they don’t have the policy reform to support those decisions on the ground.” Lovera agreed. If you are an average Midwestern “row-crop farmer, raising commodity crops on a pretty big acreage with machinery,” she said, “you do not just wake up in March 2026 and think ‘oh shit, I can’t get fertilizer, I’m going to grow lettuce this year.’’”
The current system may not work very well—but “lots of pieces of our farm policy keep people in that system,” Lovera said. “I think people who are critics of big ag sometimes miss that.”
So what levers could policymakers pull to encourage a more sustainable system?
“If you had the political will,” said Lilliston, “the farm bill is where we really need reform. You would reform some of the commodity programs, the insurance programs, to cover more, to have better coverage for other types of crops, including farms that have a diversity of crops.” In theory, they could even encourage farms that integrate a mix of crops and livestock. Manure, after all, is what farms relied on before the advent of synthetic fertilizers.
In theory, farms could partly reduce synthetic fertilizer reliance by returning to such traditional methods. Farrell pointed to programs using hog manure, which is very high in ammonium. “But one of the things with hog manure,” he said, “is that basically you can’t transport it more than 15 or 20 kilometers before the cost of shipping it outweighs the value of the nitrogen in it.” Similarly, said Ziska, “One potential possibility is a process called humanure, where you’re trying to take basically human waste from large concentrated populations—treating it, of course, to get safe compost that can then be carried back out to rural areas.” But that, too, is hard to scale.
Lilliston pointed to another example where more infrastructure, or at least the right infrastructure, would make a big difference. “We have a situation right now in Minnesota where we have, I want to say, several dozen farmers who want to grow oats. We’re right near General Mills, which buys a lot of oats, but they won’t buy it from these farmers. Part of it is there’s not a processing plant that’s super convenient, that fits what GM wants, and so there’s really just some basic infrastructure things that are not in place to grow different crops, for a farmer to be able to get their crop to a processing plant.”
This is where the government comes in. The Biden administration implemented programs to address some of the aforementioned issues, like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act’s investment in local crop processing. The administration also, in 2022, responded to price shocks from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by launching the Fertilizer Product Expansion Program, which awarded grants to projects promoting domestic fertilizer production, diversifying and decentralizing the market, and developing alternative and more sustainable technologies. And the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Program, and the Inflation Reduction Act’s additional funds for climate-smart farming practices, aimed to incentivize practices like reduced tillage—i.e. plowing fields less, which can, in addition to beneficial emissions effects, also keep more nitrogen in the ground, reducing the amount of fertilizer required in subsequent years. The Trump administration initially canceled many of these grants, before restoring some of them.
In recent days, both the Trump administration and a bipartisan group in Congress have floated proposals to help lower fertilizer prices and boost domestic production in response to the war with Iran. But so far, the talk is mostly about onshoring production or boosting competition. And the current Farm Bill floated by House Republicans continues to incentivize overapplying fertilizer rather than funding programs to reduce it, say critics like the Union of Concerned Scientists. And it does nothing to address one of the primary problems: the country’s wild overinvestment in corn. “If we as a country said we are really interested in reducing fertilizer use, we would be looking to find farmers other options than corn,” said Lilliston.
Of course, the corn industry—and the very powerful animal agriculture industry that uses corn for feed—would fight such a change tooth and nail. It’s among the many intractable forces that keep U.S. ag policy locked in place.
Perhaps that’s why some people put their hopes in technological advancement instead. A pilot program in Minnesota uses wind power to synthesize nitrogen fertilizer, and a lab at MIT is researching how to replace natural gas–sourced nitrogen fertilizer entirely, both by enhancing the natural nitrogen-fixing processes of bacteria and finding different sources for synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. It’s too early to know whether these models can deliver at scale; to fully solve the fertilizer problem, technological innovation would probably need to be paired with broader reform of the farm system.
“Typically what happens is you grow one crop, one variety of that crop, but as climate uncertainty continues you’re going to see more disasters relative to yields,” said Ziska. “We need to diversify in terms of energy, in terms of climate preparedness, in terms of keeping food costs low and so forth, and we’re just not set up for that.”
Alas, things would need to get much worse than a fertilizer price spike before we see real change in American farm policy. “Covid should have been enough to make some changes, and we didn’t,” said Lovera, referring to the worker illnesses, labor shortages, and supply-chain disruptions that roiled the sector in 2020 and 2021. Given all the “obstacles” to major reform, Ziska said, “it’s going to take unfortunately a major break in the system before things start to change.”
