American farmers are expected to plant several million fewer acres of corn in 2026 than they did in 2025, as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz throttles a key fertilizer trading corridor, along with the energy and raw materials needed to produce and transport fertilizer.

The closure is disrupting deliveries of about one-third of the world’s traded agricultural fertilizers. Fertilizer prices are rising, and farmers worldwide are cutting back on fertilizer use or shifting to less fertilizer-intensive crops.

Corn is one of the most fertilizer-intensive and widely grown crops in the United States, but the disruption extends far beyond a single crop or a single nation.

These changes are often discussed as a threat to global food supplies – and they are.

But as researchers who study agricultural nutrient cycles and nutrient pollution of our waterways, we suspect that the picture is more complicated, and in some ways more hopeful, than the headlines suggest.

That is because decades of farmers using........

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