Josh Linville
speaker
128 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 23 Mar
Josh Linville’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If you look at, say, like urea, for example, we typically import around five to five and a half million ton over what we produce because we can't make enough of it. Phosphate, that was the argument. So you talk about the sanctions and things like that. So one of the big talking points back in 2020 was,
on this countervailing duty case against Russian-Morocco imports, was we can produce enough in the States to take care of North American demand. Everybody's like, okay, cool, we'll go with it. Well, that was great if their production rates had stayed high. Unfortunately, since that point, production rates have fallen pretty decently. We've been seeing 50%, 60% versus what was normally 80%, 85%.
And Potash... We've got more than enough potash guys, not in the U.S. specifically, but Canada. They are the biggest producer. They are the biggest export. It's not even a close second. It's good to have those guys to the north of us.
Yeah, that's kind of a key point of that. It'd be really nice if we could not have that happen.
So the rail workers for the CN and CP, two of the biggest rail lines up in Canada, they also dipped down to the U.S. Their workers have been threatening a strike. They've been negotiating. And from what I understand, this isn't a pay strike. This is like a safety and you can't force relocate us and things like that. And so the union has been saying, no, you need to come to us.
You need to come to us. And the rail line, of course, is saying we're not going to do it. And finally, as of midnight, would have been Wednesday night, Thursday morning, official strike, official work stoppage. CNN and CP both blocked like, what was it, 9,000 workers between the two of them from coming to work. But within eight hours, Canadian government said, nope, we're going to send people.
We're going to assist with this negotiation. People get back to work. It's too important to the Canadian economy.
Today we know workers are going back to work. The negotiations are still ongoing with government help. But there is absolutely still a route out of this where another work stoppage gets put into place. It's not a done deal. Yesterday morning was a fantastic step towards getting back to normal, getting back to some sort of sense of normalcy. We're not there yet.
And you think about how reliant is Canadian everything on rail. They don't have the river systems we have. You think about what kind of trucking capacity it would take to make up for that kind of rail. It's impossible. So it's extremely important, really hoping these two sides can find some common ground and move on with it.
I've seen stuff like that. I'm not sure. I don't know the science behind it. I can't sit there and say it's right and I can't say it's wrong. Obviously, any sort of a stoppage is going to impact it because then you've got to get everything going and that takes time and you've got to make up for the log jam.
So it's not outside the realm of possibility to say, yeah, a couple weeks may be what it is. I just don't quite know the science behind that number. Got it. Hmm.
So I've heard this from a couple different sides. There is a camp that says, and they're looking at it from putting tariffs on fertilizer exports. And of course, the right is sitting there saying, Kamala gets in there. She's just going to do what Biden did. And the Biden administration allowed these tariffs against Morocco and Russia, phosphate to come in.
They're just going to continue to tear up the crap out of it and block even more supply from coming here. That's terrible for farmers. What they don't sit there and talk about is the fact that China, one of the biggest producers and exporters of phosphate in the world, they had tariffs put on them during the Trump administration. And Trump, if I remember correctly, wasn't above
using things like grain sales and things like that to punish, to negotiate with other countries. So I can see either one being tough for the farmer. Unfortunately, the farmer is once again getting stuck in the middle of this political game.
So you can get information around the world on countries' imports and exports data. And so we gather that. That's a very important piece to know how far ahead or behind you are. That gives you a sense of how the market is going to react. Let's face it.
If we need to buy 5 million tons, for example, and eight months into the year, we've only brought in a million, you know, we're going to start playing catch up. And what does that mean? We're probably moving to a premium versus the rest of the world to try and call those tons in. So We track this data really, really closely.
And with China, if you look at their urea exports on an average here over the last several years, somewhere between 5 to 5.5 million tons. January through July of this year, cumulative, total, 200,000 tons.
That's it. That is what the data is showing. So is the data accurate? Yeah. We believe it is, as best as we can tell. Now, that's always a question mark. Just as much as we see operating rate indications, and it's continued to show that urea operating rates have been very, very good, so that makes you kind of wonder, now, wait a minute.
If they're that far behind on exports, but their operating rates are good, where's all this product going? That's a big missing piece of the puzzle. As of right now, the data that we're looking at, usually exporting 5 to 5.5 million tons by the end of December through July, 200,000 tons.
Well, that's the problem. I would sit there and say, yeah, I could sit there and if I put my tinfoil hat on, I could conspiracy theory and say that Chinese... Government people are restricting the exports of dairy in order to drive the price higher to hurt the food supply to mess with the rest of the world. That's the tinfoil hat conspiracy theory side of it.
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