Farmers Are Collateral Damage in Trump’s Iran War – Mother Jones

It’s planting season, and 70 p.c of American farmers can’t afford enough fertilizer to plant all their crops. About a 3rd of the planet’s nitrogen fertilizer, essentially the most broadly used in international agriculture, should cross by the Strait of Hormuz. Thanks to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s struggle on Iran, that waterway is basically nonetheless closed to most ships.

It’s been described as a “slow-moving food crisis”: when farmers cannot purchase fertilizer, they do not plant as a lot, and months on, that reveals up in scarcer, pricier meals. United Nations estimates that 45 million people worldwide I may go hungry due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Although the state of affairs shouldn’t be fairly as dire in the US, American farmers are feeling the squeeze, too: fertilizer costs are changing by the minutesoybean farmers are nonetheless facing export tariffsand diesel costs are up, too.

In an Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee hearing Tuesday, Arkansas Republican Sen. John Boozman proclaimed that “food security is national security.” But the listening to provided few governmental options to the fertilizer scarcity—notably not ending the struggle.

Trent Kubik, president of the South Dakota Corn Grower’s Association, informed the committee he’d had a tough season on his farm. “We expected our costs were going to be higher than normal, as we’d be purchasing [fertilizer] closer to peak demand season,” he stated, however with the struggle on Iran, they’re “nearly doubling.”

He’s not the one one. In the first quarter of 2026, 86 American farms have already filed for Chapter 12 bankruptcy. And whereas farmers endure below the Hormuz blockade, fertilizer producers’ revenues proceed to extend.

“The fertilizer industry is one of the most heavily consolidated industries,” Omanjana Goswami of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who research agricultural coverage, informed Mother Jones. “At the same time that these companies are making billions of dollars in profits over the years, farmers have seen profit margins go down drastically because of the higher cost of fertilizer.”

Four main producers control nearly the entire US fertilizer market—they usually’ve elevated nitrogen fertilizer costs 28 p.c because the struggle on Iran started in February, in response to recent University of Illinois data.

Meanwhile, farmers are scrambling, planting much less meals, and switching to much less fertilizer-thirsty crops. “About 4 million acres of corn [in the US] have been switched over to soybean, just to make up for the fact that fertilizer availability was much less this spring,” Goswami stated.

“That’s the thing that we feel the worst about,” Kubik, the corn farmer, stated. “During the last 75 days, a lot of money was being made–but it wasn’t by farmers.”

“Farmers get thrown head first into a crisis every time global supply chains are hit,” Goswami stated. That reoccurring disaster—which additionally occurred when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and in the course of the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020—is the product of an unsustainable agricultural model that requires large quantities of fertilizer to be shipped from abroad. Some specialists counsel that even when the struggle on Iran ends tomorrow, excessive fertilizer costs will persist through at least 2027.

The Iranian struggle fertilizer shock, Goswami added, will seemingly impression wheat in specific.

Combined with some unhealthy climate earlier this spring and an unrelenting drought in the plains states, the struggle is making this the worst year for wheat yields in decades. Most wheat grown in the US (not like, say, corn or soy) is destined for consumption by people, which implies there is a good probability we’ll see that worth shock in the bread aisle later this yr.

Meanwhile, past some efforts at mandating greater price transparency from fertilizer producers, farmers have not been provided any actual aid.

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), at Tuesday’s listening to, was outrageous. “Between the war in Iran, spiking fuel and fertilizer prices, and illegal trade wars, increasing the cost of equipment, and limiting market access, it’s no wonder that farmers in Georgia I talked to say that they can’t take much more,” he stated at this week’s listening to. “Fertilizer prices are increasing. Diesel costs have increased by over $2 a gallon compared to this time last year and there’s no end in sight. At this point, the best-case scenario for farmers is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.”

It was open, he identified, earlier than the struggle began.