War in Iran Is Creating a Fertilizer Crisis Like Never Before
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Why is the Iran‑U.S. conflict causing a sudden fertilizer price spike?
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway
and I'm Joe Wasenthal.
Joe, if you were a Roman general. Or a feudal lord. And you wanted to wage war on your next door neighbors. I don't know. This is completely hypothetical.
Yeah. What time of year really?
What time of year do you think would be the best time to actually do it?
You know, I haven't thought about this before, if I'm being totally honest.
You're not sitting at home thinking about if you were a Roman general at all hours of the day.
I'm the one guy who doesn't think about stuff like that. I don't know much about Rome. I d go on.
Okay. So for much of human history, if you were gonna go to war, you would try to avoid certain times of year. And those times were generally the spring sowing season and the fall harvest. And there's two reasons you would do that. One is because a lot of your soldiers are actually farmers, you know, they're part-time soldiers, so their day job is farming.
How does the war’s timing worsen the spring planting fertilizer crunch?
And the second one is you don't want to completely disrupt your food supply.
Right. That makes a ton of sense. I hadn't thought about that, but yes, it makes a ton of sense.
All right. So fast forward to twenty twenty six and we've clearly forgotten much of human history because uh we have a US Israeli war against Iran that is coming at perhaps the worst possible time in terms of agriculture.
You know, I again I hadn't thought about this at all. So I did learn over the last week, you know, when I think about the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz and so forth, obviously I think uh oil and energy, I have become aware through your writing and others that it's also a major choke point or major throughway for related foodstuffs, including fertilizer. I had not heard anything about the timing element. However, until you just brought it up just now.
Yeah, so everyone's getting ready for spring planting at the moment. So this is precisely when you theoretically would be using a lot of fertilizer. And just in the past week or so we've seen prices for urea, which is, you know, one of the I guess most popular types of fertilizer. Those have shot up like twenty-five percent.
Yeah.
It's also fascinating to me, I didn't know this, but we have all these different types of urea. So you have Egyptian granular urea, New Orleans urea We're gonna talk about all of it. I've wanted to do a fertilizer episode for a long time. I wanna talk about what's going on with the Moroccan fertilizer industry as well, but I am s I am weirdly excited to be talking about urea today.
I'm looking forward to it. Let's do it.
All right, and we have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Alexis Maxwell. She's an analyst on the Bloomberg Intelligence Agriculture team and she's been writing a lot about this. So Alexis, thank you so much for coming on Outbots. Oh, thank you for having me. Is that framing correct? Is this kind of not a great time slash the worst possible time to be driving the price of fertilizer up?
Yeah, definitely. I couldn't think of a worse time to have a supply side shock and s resulting surge in fertilizer prices for farmers effectively. Uh, just about everywhere. Second quarter is the timeline when the northern hemisphere starts their planting season.
What is Urea?
Yeah, so urea is the most commonly used form of nitrogen. Crops are going to demand a variety of fertilizers, but the big three that you have to use are gonna be your nitrogen, phosphate, and potash. And in the industry we call it your NPKs. Urea is a form of nitrogen.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why is the Iran‑U.S. conflict causing a sudden fertilizer price spike?
0:00–1:47
2
How does the war’s timing worsen the spring planting fertilizer crunch?
1:47–4:32
3
What is urea and how is it produced from natural gas?
4:32–9:38
4
Why are most urea plants located near cheap natural‑gas supplies?
9:38–15:01
5
How did the 2022‑2023 supply shocks reshape global fertilizer markets?
15:01–20:36
6
What options do U.S. farmers have to offset soaring nitrogen costs?
20:36–25:18
7
How will higher fertilizer prices translate into food‑price pressure for consumers?
25:18–29:22
8
What are the long‑term outlook and possible resolutions for the fertilizer crisis?
29:22–32:46
Speakers
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