Lorenda Overman's family has farmed the land around Goldsboro, North Carolina, for generations. This spring, the math stopped working. Fertilizer and nitrogen costs on her operation jumped from $139 per acre last year to $217 this season, a hit that arrived just as planting began and budgets were already set.
She is far from alone. A new survey from the American Farm Bureau Federation, conducted April 3 through April 11, found that almost six in ten U.S. farmers, 58%, report worsening financial conditions amid rising input and fuel costs. The numbers paint a picture of an agricultural sector squeezed between global conflict and grocery-aisle reality, with no relief in sight.
The cause is not a mystery. Shipping disruptions tied to the war in the Middle East have choked the supply lines that deliver fertilizer to American farms. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which a massive share of global fertilizer exports must pass, has been effectively constricted since the U.S. and Israel struck Iran on February 28, AP News reported. About 15% of U.S. fertilizer imports come from the Middle East, and the region supplies roughly half the world's urea and 30% of its ammonia.
That is not some abstract trade statistic. It means the stuff farmers need to grow corn, cotton, rice, and peanuts is harder to get and far more expensive, right when they need it most.
The Farm Bureau's data reveals a sharp regional divide. In the Midwest, 67% of producers locked in fertilizer supplies early by pre-booking ahead of the season. In the South, only 19% did. The result: 78% of Southern farmers say they cannot afford all the fertilizer they need, compared with 48% in the Midwest.
Across the Western, Northeast, and Southern regions, at least 66% of farmers said they could not afford necessary fertilizer. More than 80% of rice, cotton, and peanut producers reported the same.
Overman explained why she did not order ahead. Her farm could not make ends meet last year, and she hoped prices would fall as planting season began. They didn't. They climbed. She told CNBC:
"Three years we've had record high input prices, and it has just got higher the last six or eight weeks."
That three-year streak of elevated costs matters. It means this is not a one-season shock. Farmers have been absorbing blow after blow, and the Iran conflict simply made a bad situation worse at the worst possible moment.
The broader economic picture for working Americans has been similarly frustrating. Federal claims about job creation have often clashed with the lived experience of families watching costs outpace wages, and farmers are no exception.
With fertilizer prices spiking, growers are making hard choices. Overman said her farm will cut back corn acreage and pivot to soybeans, a crop that demands less fertilizer and nitrogen. She also plans to spread what fertilizer she can afford more thinly across her fields.
Overman did not hide the urgency:
"We can't wait for the [Strait of Hormuz] to open back up and those ships to get here before we have to purchase those inputs."
Tommy Salisbury, an Oklahoma farmer and leader with the Farm Bureau's young farmers and ranchers group, described the timing as devastating. He told CNBC:
"That increase that we've talked about on fertilizer happened right before spring planning. It was the worst timing of all. We were already budgeted."
Salisbury is also reducing milo acreage and shifting toward soybeans. His summary of the economics was blunt:
"We are paying input prices of 2026, but getting crop prices of the '70s and '80s."
That line should stop anyone who thinks this is merely a temporary inconvenience. When input costs belong to 2026 and crop prices belong to four decades ago, the margin isn't thin, it may not exist at all.
Farm Bureau president Zippy Duvall warned that farmers who did not preorder and prepay for fertilizer may not be able to obtain it at all. As Breitbart reported, Duvall said:
"We're being told that many of our farmers that haven't preordered their fertilizer and paid for it may not even obtain the fertilizer that they're going to need during the season or for spring planting."
Harry Ott, a cotton, corn, and peanut farmer who also leads the South Carolina Farm Bureau, called it "a really dire situation that our farmers facing." And Jacqui Fatka, a farm supply economist for CoBank, cautioned that even if the conflict eases, the disruption will linger. Newsmax reported her warning: "There's going to be a tail to this to get everything turned back on, sent back out."
A Tennessee farmer cited in the same reporting said his fertilizer bill will rise by roughly $100,000 this season, a 40% increase from last year. That is not a rounding error. That is the kind of cost swing that pushes family operations toward the edge.
The crisis has a policy dimension that makes it worse. The Washington Times published an analysis arguing that U.S. countervailing duties on phosphate fertilizers from Morocco and Russia have reduced import competition and raised costs for American farmers, even before the war. The authors cited Texas A&M Agricultural and Food Policy Center research finding those duties contributed more than $1 billion a year in added costs ultimately passed on to consumers through higher grocery prices. They called for an immediate temporary suspension of the duties given the global fertilizer crisis.
That argument deserves serious attention. When a war disrupts 20% of global phosphate supply, as the Washington Times piece contends, layering trade penalties on top of a supply shock is the kind of policy rigidity that punishes the people who can least afford it.
The American Farm Bureau Federation, for its part, aims to meet with the White House in the coming months to push for more aid for farmers. What specific relief the group plans to request remains unclear. But the clock is ticking. Spring planting is underway now. Crops that don't get adequate fertilizer this month won't produce adequate yields in the fall.
With dozens of congressional seats in flux heading into 2026, farm-state lawmakers would do well to pay attention. Rural voters remember who showed up when the bills came due, and who didn't.
The consequences of this crisis will not stay on the farm. When growers cut back corn acreage, spread fertilizer thin, and shift to less input-intensive crops, the result is lower production. Lower production means tighter supply. Tighter supply means higher prices at the grocery store, for bread, for meat, for cooking oil, for everything downstream of the field.
Overman summed up the daily reality of farming in a single sentence: "We're always battling weather, disease and insects." Now add a war-driven fertilizer crisis, three years of record-high input costs, and crop prices that haven't kept pace in decades.
The people who feed this country are telling anyone who will listen that they are running out of room. The survey data backs them up. The question is whether Washington will act before the harvest, or after the damage is done.
American farmers don't need sympathy. They need supply lines that work, trade policy that makes sense, and leaders who understand that when the people who grow the food can't afford to grow it, everyone pays the price.
