Why American Farmers Are Feeling the Pain of the Iran War

Disruptions to the production and trade of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer have exposed the risks of American agriculture’s dependence on it—and prompted a renewed look at alternatives.

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........

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