War in Iran tightens fertilizer supply for farmers

urea fertilizer – As fighting in Iran disrupts the Strait of Hormuz, fuel and natural gas prices have surged—feeding into higher global nitrogen fertilizer costs. Between February and mid-May, U.S. urea prices jumped from about $460 per ton to nearly $600 per ton, raising the s

The grocery bill can change without anyone in a supermarket touching a single product—just by where the world’s ships pass and how much energy costs when they do.

Since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran began. the Strait of Hormuz has faced a choke hold. and fuel prices have surged. That shock has rippled into global supplies of critical resources, including fertilizer. Over that same period. global nitrogen fertilizer prices jumped sharply. forcing agriculture officials worldwide to scramble to offset costs and shore up supplies before shortages can hit food crops.

Between February, when the war began, and mid-May, U.S. prices for urea—one of the most common fertilizers—rose from around $460 per ton to nearly $600 per ton.

The mechanism is brutally simple: fertilizer depends on natural gas twice over. To make urea. producers rely on natural gas as both an ingredient and a fuel source. according to Asim Biswas. a professor in the school of environmental sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario. Even though the U.S. does not rely on Middle East natural gas. about 20 percent of the world’s liquified natural gas passes through the Strait of Hormuz. When that supply route is disrupted, prices rise globally—and fertilizer follows.

For Biswas, the human part comes in the timing and the uncertainty. “All this uncertainty is happening from a global scale to the farmer’s field,” he says. “We are going to see, as the general public, on our grocery bill and on the dinner plate.”

The need for fertilizer is also not theoretical. Urea fertilizer is produced using an energy-intensive method called the Haber-Bosch process. That process uses methane—the primary component of natural gas—and atmospheric nitrogen to make ammonia, which is then converted into urea.

Without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, researchers estimate farmers could only feed around half of the approximately eight billion people on the planet. In that sense, the fertilizer debate is less about preference than about whether the farming system can keep producing year after year.

Biswas compares it to a salary. Your salary is the input; your spending is the output. A healthy forest ecosystem can balance nutrient “inputs” with the slow “output” of tree growth. But a farmer harvesting 150 bushels of corn per year from a field has to replenish nutrients so corn can be grown again next year. “We need to have that [fertilizer] input; otherwise output will exhaust the bank account,” Biswas says.

When fertilizer is scarce, farmers often consider cutting back. “In many cases, when there’s not enough fertilizer, farmers start to think about ‘Oh, maybe I should put less.’ The moment we put less, the production is being impacted,” Biswas adds.

Those impacts arrive at the worst possible moment for the global food calendar. Spring is planting season for many farmers in the Northern Hemisphere, and the war’s effects on fertilizer hit right when growers must decide whether they can afford to buy what they need.

In March, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) estimated that rising costs for energy and fertilizer caused by the Iran war risk sending some 45 million additional people into “acute food insecurity.”

Farmers, meanwhile, are not simply facing higher prices—they’re facing decisions under pressure. They can try new planting methods or crops, or even forgo a planting season altogether. But any of those choices can carry its own risk.

An April 2026 poll conducted by researchers at the Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture found that more than 65 percent of farmers in the U.S. said they believed the conflict in Iran would have a “negative” or “very negative” effect on their net income. The pressure is heavier in lower-income countries, where Biswas says wealthy nations such as Canada and the U.S. may subsidize fertilizer costs, while many countries such as in Africa and parts of Latin America can’t.

Farmers have been through similar shocks before. In 2022, pressures rose after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted energy and fertilizer prices as well. But at the time, crop prices such as corn were at “record” highs, helping farmers offset higher production costs. Joana Colussi. an assistant professor in the department of agricultural economics at Purdue University and a conductor of the April 2026 poll. says that’s not the case today—meaning prices will rise without that kind of relief.

Even changes in what gets planted can move markets in ways that hurt households far from any field. Some farmers may consider crops that don’t rely as heavily on nitrogen fertilizers. Soybeans. for instance. can absorb nitrogen directly from the atmosphere through a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing Rhizobium bacteria that form “nodules” on the roots of the legumes. Biswas says.

But if too many farmers switch from corn to soybeans, soybean prices can plummet. And if some farmers take the risk and stick with expensive, nitrogen-intensive corn, a smaller supply can push corn prices higher. The result is straightforward: higher grocery bills.

What makes the problem so frustrating for farmers is that they can’t control these market swings. “We say that farmers are not the price setter,” Biswas says. “They are the price taker.”

The question now is how to reduce the vulnerability—either by changing supply, changing farming practices, or both.

One option is expanding fertilizer production capacity in the U.S. according to Farzad Taheripour. a research professor in the department of agricultural economics at Purdue University. The country has no shortage of natural gas. he says. but it could use more industrial capacity to convert natural gas into nitrogen fertilizer.

“Within the U.S. to help the agriculture sector and to hedge against changes in the energy market outside the U.S. we need to expand our capacity to produce more fertilizer from domestic sources—natural gas. ” Taheripour says. He adds that doing so may be “an attractive investment” for the U.S. to consider.

Genetically modified crops are another potential lever. In theory, they could require less nitrogen to grow, some experts say. But Biswas warns that biotechnology is not a substitute for fertilizer. “This approach is ‘not a substitute for a fertilizer,’” he says. While biotechnology may improve a plant’s ability to source nutrients from its environment. it does not eliminate the basic requirement for nutrients such as nitrogen.

A different way to think about the problem may be needed as well. Biswas says policymakers should treat fertilizer as a core element of the food system, not just a commodity. In a commentary in Nature earlier this month. he and his co-authors argued that world governments ought to treat fertilizer as a “crucial part of the food system. ” not just a commodity.

They point to options such as creating fertilizer stockpiles similar to strategic petroleum reserves—the approach the European Union is currently considering—along with more efficient application methods and lower-carbon fertilizers.

“Unless governments treat fertilizer production as strategic infrastructure,” Biswas and his co-authors wrote, “the world will keep lurching from energy shock to harvest failure.”

For now, the fertilizer pipeline has become another front in a conflict thousands of miles away from dinner tables. And for farmers in the Northern Hemisphere weighing planting decisions this spring. the uncertainty isn’t abstract—it’s measured in what they can afford to put into the ground. and what their fields can return.

fertilizer nitrogen urea Haber-Bosch process Strait of Hormuz natural gas prices food insecurity agriculture economics global food system