The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has put a choke hold on the vital Strait of Hormuz waterway, leading fuel prices to skyrocket and jeopardizing global stocks of critical resources—including fertilizer.
Since the war began, global nitrogen fertilizer prices have jumped, sending agriculture officials around the world scrambling to offset costs and shore up supplies before the shortage hits food crops. Between February, when the war began, and mid-May, U.S. prices for urea, a common fertilizer, jumped from around $460 per ton to nearly $600 per ton.
The reason why fertilizer is in such jeopardy has to do with how it is manufactured: To make urea, for instance, producers in the U.S. often rely on natural gas both as an ingredient and as a fuel source, explains Asim Biswas, a professor in the school of environmental sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario. Although the U.S. does not rely on natural gas from the Middle East, about 20 percent of the world’s liquified natural gas passes through the Strait of Hormuz, and the disruption of this supply has caused prices to increase globally. The consequence of the effect on fertilizer is higher food costs—and perhaps even food shortages.
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“All this uncertainty is happening from a global scale to the farmer’s field,” Biswas says, “which we are going to see, as the general public, on our grocery bill and on the dinner plate.”
Why do we even need fertilizer?
To make urea fertilizer, manufacturers use an energy-intensive method called the Haber-Bosch process, which uses methane—the primary component of natural gas—and atmospheric nitrogen to make ammonia. That ammonia is then converted into urea.
In the face of soaring fertilizer and energy costs, it may make sense to ask, “Why not just use less?” Without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, researchers estimate farmers could only feed around half of the approximately eight billon people on the planet.
For farmers, Biswas compares the need for fertilizer to a salary: Your salary is the input, and your spending is the output. A healthy forest ecosystem may balance “inputs” of organic matter and nutrients with the slow “output” of tree growth. But a farmer harvesting 150 bushels of corn per year from a field must replenish the nutrients to grow corn again the next year. “We need to have that [fertilizer] input; otherwise output will exhaust the bank account,” Biswas says.
“In many cases, when there’s not enough fertilizer, farmers start to think about ‘Oh, maybe I should put less.’ The moment we put less, the production is being impacted,” he adds.
Put simply, rising farm costs may mean less food: In March the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), estimated that the rising cost of energy and fertilizer as a result of the Iran war risks sending some 45 million additional people into “acute food insecurity.”
What does this mean for food costs?
Spring is planting season for many farmers in the Northern Hemisphere, so the timing of the war’s effects on fertilizer puts growers in a difficult position: they have to balance using costly materials with potentially trying new planting methods or crops—or even forgoing a planting season altogether.
According to a poll conducted in April 2026 by researchers at the Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture, more than 65 percent of farmers in the U.S. said they believed the conflict in Iran would have a “negative” or “very negative” effect on their net income. Farmers in lower-income countries are especially vulnerable. While wealthy countries such as Canada and the U.S. may subsidize fertilizer costs, many countries, such as in Africa and parts of Latin America, can’t, Biswas says.
In 2022 farmers felt similar pressures after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which disrupted energy and fertilizer prices, too. But at the time, prices for crops such as corn were at “record” highs, which helped farmers offset the cost of higher production, explains Joana Colussi, an assistant professor in the department of agricultural economics at Purdue University and a conductor of the April 2026 poll. That’s not the case today, so prices will rise without any relief.
In response to high fertilizer costs, some farmers might turn to crops that don’t require as much nitrogen to grow reliably. Soybeans, for instance, can absorb nitrogen directly from the atmosphere through a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing Rhizobium bacteria, which form “nodules” on the roots of the legumes, Biswas says.
But if too many farmers switch to soybeans over, say, corn, the price of soybeans will plummet. Similarly, if some farmers take the risk and stick with expensive, nitrogen-intensive corn, a smaller supply could mean the price of corn goes up. That equates to higher grocery bills.
Farmers have little control over these dynamics. “We say that farmers are not the price setter,” Biswas says.” They are the price taker.”
Can we make more fertilizer in the U.S.?
To resolve some of these pressures, policymakers could consider expanding fertilizer production in the U.S., says Farzad Taheripour, a research professor in the department of agricultural economics at Purdue University. While the country has no shortage of natural gas, it could use more the industrial capacity to convert that natural gas into nitrogen fertilizer.
“Within the U.S., to help the agriculture sector and to hedge against changes in the energy market outside the U.S., we need to expand our capacity to produce more fertilizer from domestic sources—natural gas,” says Taheripour, adding that doing so may be “an attractive investment” for the U.S. to consider.
In theory, genetically modified crops—which can require less nitrogen to grow, for instance—could also help, some experts say. But this approach is “not a substitute for a fertilizer,” Biswas says. While biotechnology may improve a plant’s ability to source nutrients from its environment, it does not eliminate the basic requirement for nutrients such as nitrogen.
Another solution may simply be thinking about fertilizer differently, Biswas says. In a commentary in Nature earlier this month, he and his co-authors argued that world governments ought to treat fertilizer as a “crucial part of the food system,” not just a commodity. Countries might consider creating stockpiles of fertilizer similar to strategic petroleum reserves—an approach that the European Union is currently considering—as well as more efficient application methods and lower-carbon fertilizers.
“Unless governments treat fertilizer production as strategic infrastructure,” Biswas and his co-authors wrote, “the world will keep lurching from energy shock to harvest failure.”