Farm Progress reports that fertilizer prices aren’t coming own anytime soon, thanks to Trump’s aimless war in Iran, Russia’s similarly reckless war on Ukraine, and declining American phosphorus production:
“Domestic phosphorus is running short,” said Ed Thomas, vice president of government affairs at The Fertilizer Institute. As a result, the U.S. is forced to rely more heavily on imports. “If I had any one message to growers, it’s we have a supply issue with phosphate.”
From 2019 to 2026, the U.S. lost about 10% a year in phosphate production from Florida facilities. This happened not because they are not mining the same amount of rock, but because the quality of rock has declined, Thomas explained.
“They mine the same amount of rock but get less fertilizer. So, from 2019 to 2026, we’ve gotten about 100,000 short tons less production,” he said [Mike Wilson and Pam Caraway, “5 Warning Signs That Fertilizer Prices Will Stay High Indefinitely,” Farm Progress, 2026.08.04].
Wilson and Caraway tell farmers to sigh at the inevitability of volatility and “be as efficient as possible with fertilizer dollars.” Hmmm… we could get a lot of efficiency by simply cutting fertilizer application by half… since half is how much fertilizer is getting thrown on fields and doing no good for crop production or anything else:
Research shows that as much as 50% of applied nitrogen fertilizer is in excess of what crops need and is unused by plants. A portion of the excess unused fertilizer gets converted into gases like nitrous oxide (N2O) by soil microbes and released into the environment. Nitrous oxide is a potent heat-trapping gas: 265 times more powerful than carbon dioxide when it comes to its warming potential.
…Nitrogen overuse wreaks havoc in the environment because the runoff from unused fertilizer contains a vast amount of reactive nitrogen in the form of nitrates. When washed into lakes and streams, this reactive nitrogen helps algae multiply very quickly and create algal blooms. Algal blooms consume dissolved oxygen in the water, creating low- to no-oxygen areas in aquatic ecosystems called “dead zones” where nothing can survive. Farmers themselves are often frustrated by these outcomes, knowing that the fertilizer they paid for is literally washing away and causing damage downstream.
…Nitrogen in the form of nitrate also leaches into groundwater sources and can end up contaminating drinking water supplies. Nitrate contamination is a widely reported problem in agriculture-heavy states like Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Exposure to nitrate is linked to a variety of serious health problems, as my colleague UCS Research Director for the Food & Environment program Stacy Woods writes. This means farming families—who are often on private wells—can be among the first harmed when nitrogen pollution reaches groundwater. Fertilizer overuse also harms the soil itself.
High doses of synthetic nitrogen acidify soils and disrupt the microbial communities that make nutrients naturally available to plants. Over time, this reduces soil biodiversity, suppresses beneficial fungi, and even harms earthworm populations that keep soils aerated and fertile. Instead of building living, resilient soils that are like sponges, heavy fertilizer use can leave land more degraded and make soils cement-like, dependent on ever-higher chemical inputs to provide the required plant nutrition. This soil degradation hurts farmers’ long-term profitability, trapping them in a cycle of needing ever more fertilizer just to maintain yields [Omajana Goswami, “Half Wasted: Fertilizer Overuse, Pollution, and the Global Nitrogen Cycle,” Union of Concerned Scientists: The Equation, 2025.11.19].
Using less fertilizer would be easy if farmers would just do the opposite of what the ag-industrial complex and the Trump Administration promote:
…neither efficiency improvements and precision, nor acreage reductions alone can deliver the scale of change required. Moving away from subsidies that encourage the overproduction of commodity crops would help transform current agricultural systems, as would investing more in US Department of Agriculture programs like the Conservation Stewardship Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which are backed by decades of science and farmer experience and can reduce reliance on costly synthetic fertilizers, thus improving soil health, protecting habitat, and improving water and air quality.
The bottom-line is clear: We need a large-scale shift to farming practices based on the science of agroecology, which treats farms like natural systems. Agroecological practices such as cover crops, buffer strips, restored wetlands, and managed grazing further help keep nutrients in place and build long-term soil health [Goswami, 2025.11.19].
The most efficient use of fertilizer dollars is to move those dollars out of the fertilizer column and into more sustainable and profitable columns like diverse cover crops, broader crop rotation, and other organic farming practices.
The number of acres in ‘agroecosystems’ has tripled since the 1940s so poor ag practices like tiling have made soils unable to absorb rainfall creating toxic runoff and flooding.
In red states like South Dakota freedom equals the right to pollute and agriculture is the leading source of pollution in the waters of the United States. Most East River lakes are already eutrophic shit holes filled with toxic algae and unable to even support fish populations so the Prairie Pothole Region is becoming increasingly threatened by the encroachment of industrial agriculture but more irrigation means pumping from depleted aquifers mainly recharged by the Prairie Pothole Region.
Industrial agriculture is ecocide and for those of us who love the Earth shucks like farm subsidies are greenwashing but ironically many Republicans actually benefitting from reduced greenhouse emissions decry the sequestration of carbon as caving to the Green New Deal. 20 of Iowa’s 99 counties are devoted exclusively to food that is ultimately burned for automobile fuel but according to Iowa State University some land impacted by pipelines never recovers from the disturbance. Iowa contributes some 40% of the pollution killing the Gulf of Mexico.
Welfare farmers have ruined their own wells and the Big Sioux River but South Dakota will flout Waters of the United States rulings until the cows come home unless or until downstream states cry foul. Now, that has happened as the proposed $10 billion Dakota Mainstem Regional Water System pipeline project would supply South Dakota and portions of three neighboring states, with a capacity of 195 million gallons per day.
The planned expansion of the Lewis and Clark Rural Water System that the system’s members already project will need an additional 95 million gallons per day over the next 40 years plan to increase capacity to 60 million gallons per day by 2030 even as the US Army Corps of Engineers warns of low Missouri River levels.
Cancer rates in Iowa are the second highest in the US and public polling indicates that nearly 80% of registered Iowa voters support transition to mandatory pollution reduction requirements for large-scale agriculture. Both candidates for governor, the Democratic nominee Rob Sand and the Earth hater Zach Lahn, say more needs to be done.