War in Iran Is Creating a Fertilizer Crisis Like Never Before

Summary

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Odd Lots Podcast Summary

Episode: War in Iran Is Creating a Fertilizer Crisis Like Never Before
Date: March 11, 2026
Hosts: Joe Weisenthal & Tracy Alloway
Guest: Alexis Maxwell, Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence Agriculture

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into how the 2026 US-Israeli conflict with Iran is triggering an unprecedented fertilizer crisis, just as the Northern Hemisphere's spring planting season begins. Joe, Tracy, and guest Alexis Maxwell discuss the global importance of fertilizer—particularly urea—its ties to energy markets, the ripple effects of disrupted supply chains, and why this moment is uniquely perilous for farmers and ultimately, global food prices.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Timing of Crisis & Historical Context

• War's Timing & Agriculture:
  • Historically, wars avoided planting/harvest seasons because soldiers were often also farmers, and disruptions jeopardized food supply (03:02–03:32).
  • "Fast forward to 2026 and we've clearly forgotten much of human history because we have a US Israeli war against Iran that is coming at perhaps the worst possible time in terms of agriculture."
    — Tracy Alloway (03:32)

2. Urea and the Global Fertilizer Market

• What is Urea?
  • Urea is the world’s most commonly used nitrogen fertilizer, made from natural gas via ammonia (05:41).
  • "If you want urea, the way that you get it is by starting first with natural gas, you crack it into ammonia, and then you run another chemical conversion on it..."
    — Alexis Maxwell (05:41)
• Impact of Haber-Bosch Process:
  • Conventional fertilizer supports about half the world’s population; without it, earth could support only ~4 billion people (07:08).
  • "Conventional fertilizer is, I think, the most important invention to the most number of people on this planet."
    — Alexis Maxwell (07:08)

3. Supply Chain, Logistics, and Geographic Dependencies

• Manufacturing & Transport:
  • Plants are typically located near cheap natural gas (Russia, Middle East, US, China) because shipping urea granules is far easier and cheaper than transporting gas (08:34).
• Lack of Strategic Reserves:
  • Urea is produced year-round but demanded only seasonally; storing it introduces price risk and logistical challenges. Unlike oil, there are no strategic reserves (09:44–12:39).
  • "There isn't a strategic reserve of urea the same way that we would have it, like in oil..."
    — Alexis Maxwell (10:39)
• Middle East Choke Point:
  • About 45% of global tradable urea and 20% of ammonia comes from the Persian Gulf; alternatives (Russia, China) are unavailable due to sanctions/export bans (11:00–12:39).

4. Regional Nuances: Morocco's Role

• Phosphate Powerhouse:
  • Morocco, thanks to vast phosphate reserves and low-cost production, is a critical supplier globally, akin to Saudi Arabia’s role in oil (13:48).

5. Price Surges and Historical Comparisons

• Urea Price History:
  • Prices spiked in 2022 after the Ukraine invasion and China's export bans, raising costs from ~$300 to $1,100/ton (17:08).
  • Price now: $600–$700/ton, not a record in nominal terms, but much higher relative to crop prices (21:48).
• Effect on Farmers:
  • US farmers have more options (reduce fertilizer, crop switching, alternate products) than those in the EU or India, but margins are extremely thin (20:17–21:48).

6. Market Structure, Vulnerabilities, and Global Disparities

• Structural Pain:
  • Small-scale farmers are hit hardest. Thin margins and bankruptcies (Chapter 12) are rising among US farms due to high input costs and unfavorable crop–input price spreads (23:47).
• Nature of Current Crisis:
  • Previous cycles (2007–8) were demand-driven; this crisis is distinctly supply-driven, compounded by loss of supply from China, Russia, and now the Middle East (24:39).
• Storage & Supply Reliability:
  • Unlike with metals or oil, fertilizers like urea aren't stored in large quantities, amplifying vulnerability to supply shocks (35:14).

7. Immediate Impacts and Recovery Timelines

• How Fast Could Supply Return?
  • Even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens, at least 2–3 weeks are needed to restart urea production and shipments due to plant shutdowns and complex logistics (27:25–27:40).
  • "[...To] restart a fertilizer facility, it's going to take two or three days of a natural gas burn just to get the plant to where it is producing urea again."
    — Alexis Maxwell (27:40)

8. Downstream Effects: Food Prices and Global Food Security

• Lag to Grocery Prices:
  • Reductions in fertilizer use will likely lower yields (e.g., US corn could drop from 186 to 182 bushels/acre), which will ripple into food prices over the next 1–2 years (31:18).
  • "If the strait reopened next week, you would see urea prices sort of snap back... But food production impacts will move through the system over a year or two."
    — Alexis Maxwell (31:18)
• Global Implications:
  • US farmers will fare better than those in developing countries; poorest and least-scaled are most at risk from food insecurity or outright shortages (34:22–36:19).
  • "No one wants to pay higher groceries, but it's a lot better than outright famine, which is just the risk when you do such a massive shock to the food supply."
    — Joe Weisenthal (36:19)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I can't think of an invention that on one hand is more responsible for billions of lives, but also, at the same time, generates a product that is used as a weapon of war.”
  — Alexis Maxwell [07:08]

• “There isn't a strategic reserve of urea the same way we would have it, like in oil, for example, which is partially why this crisis is really compounding for urea.”
  — Alexis Maxwell [10:39]

• “It's all relative... What's happening now is probably the worst it's ever been for farmers looking to buy nitrogen... I'm expecting once we have prices settle on Friday, that we'll set a new record for the most expensive that urea has ever been to a foreign farmer.”
  — Alexis Maxwell [21:48–22:42]

• “It's really disturbing to think like, yeah, I mean, no one wants to pay higher groceries, but it's a lot better than outright famine, which is just the risk when you do such a massive shock to the food supply.”
  — Joe Weisenthal [36:19]

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Important Timestamps

• [02:25]: Episode proper begins; intro & historical context on timing of war and agriculture
• [05:41]: Explanation of urea & fertilizer chemistry
• [07:08]: Importance of the Haber-Bosch process and modern fertilizer to population growth
• [10:39]–[12:39]: Seasonality, storage challenges, and Middle East's market share
• [13:48]: Morocco's significance in global phosphate supply
• [17:08]: Egyptian urea price history & impact of the 2022 price spike
• [20:17]–[23:47]: Farmer decision-making and squeezed US farm margins
• [24:39]: Structural differences between current and past fertilizer crises
• [27:25]–[27:40]: Recovery timeline for fertilizer supply if Strait of Hormuz reopens
• [31:18]: How fertilizer costs feed into food prices and yields
• [34:22]–[36:19]: Disparities in impact—big vs. small farmers; US vs. emerging markets

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Takeaways

• The Iran war is disrupting an already fragile global fertilizer market, with knock-on effects that are likely to last for multiple planting seasons.
• This supply-driven crisis is hitting farmers’ margins hard, especially small-scale producers.
• US farmers have more ability to adapt, but the poorest, especially in developing nations, will be hit hardest—raising the stakes from price inflation to possible food insecurity.
• Unlike oil, the lack of strategic fertilizer reserves leaves the supply chain highly vulnerable to geopolitical shocks.
• Food price inflation is likely to be sustained and significant, with real potential for reduced harvests and global repercussions.

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For those curious about the global interplay between war, energy, fertilizer, and food security, this episode offers a lucid, engaging, and sobering analysis of a crisis that's just beginning to play out.

Transcript

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[Tracy Alloway]

Hello and welcome to another episod of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

[Tracy Alloway]

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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Tracy Alloway]

What time of year?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yes, really.

[Tracy Alloway]

What time of Year do you think would be the best time to actually do it?

[Joe Weisenthal]

You know, I haven't thought about this before, if I'm being totally honest.

[Tracy Alloway]

You're not sitting at home thinking about if you were a Roman general at all hours of the day.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I'm the one guy who doesn't about stuff like that. I don't know much about Rome. Go on.

[Tracy Alloway]

Okay, so for much of human history, if you were going to go to war, you would try to avoid certain times of year. And those times were generally the spring sewing 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. They're part time soldiers, so their day job is farming. And the second one is you don't want to completely disrupt your food supply. Right.

[Joe Weisenthal]

That makes a ton of sense. I hadn't thought about that, but yes, makes a ton of sense.

[Tracy Alloway]

All right, so Fast forward to 2026 and we've clearly forgotten much of human history because we have a US Israeli war against Iran that is coming at perhaps the worst possible time in terms of agriculture.

[Joe Weisenthal]

You know, 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 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

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 25%. 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 going to talk about all of it. I've wanted to do a fertilizer episode for a long time. I want to talk about what's going on with the Moroccan fertilizer industry as well. But I'm weirdly excited to be talking about urea today.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I'm looking forward to it. Let's do it.

[Tracy Alloway]

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 Oddbots.

[Alexis Maxwell]

Oh, thank you for having me.

[Tracy Alloway]

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?

[Alexis Maxwell]

Yeah, definitely. I couldn't think of a worse time to have a supply side shock and resulting surge in fertilizer prices for farmers effectively just about everywhere. Second quarter is the timeline when the Northern hemisphere starts their planting season.

[Joe Weisenthal]

What is urea?

[Alexis Maxwell]

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 going to be your nitrogen, phosphate and potash. And in the industry, we call it your NPKs. Urea is a form of nitrogen. I think about this like a step ladder. If you want urea, the way that you get it is by starting first with natural gas, you crack it into ammonia, and then you run another chemical conversion on it, and you turn it into a granular product that is easy to apply, easy to transport, and is about 46% nitrogen. And for those of you who've never applied fertilizer or planted crops, you've probably bought some flowers at some point in your life and you get a little packet that has some, like, white crystals in it, you're going to have urea in there to help your flowers grow.

[Tracy Alloway]

I didn't know that. That's interesting. Okay, so one thing I know about fertilizer, other than most of it smells pretty bad, but you always hear this thing about the Haber Bosch process and how the guy who basically, I guess, invented the way we get fertilizer nowadays is responsible both for a massive boom in the human population because everyone gets to eat more, but also responsible for a lot of at the same time. Can you talk about, I guess, the origins of all of this?

[Alexis Maxwell]

Yeah, I think I'll call it one of the greatest paradoxes of humanity. You know, Tracy, I can't think of an invention that on one hand is more responsible for billions of lives, but also, at the same time generates a product that is used as a weapon of war. I think some people will tell you, with the global population just over 7 billion, about half of the people on the earth today are here because of conventional fertilizers. If we were to, let's just say tomorrow, stop using conventional fertilizer, and we converted everything back to organic and we farmed every single acre of arable land out there. They say that the earth could really only support a population of about 4 billion people. So conventional fertilizer is, I think, the most important invention to the most number of people on this planet.

[Joe Weisenthal]

So, okay, explain to me. So urea comes from, it's downstream from natural gas. And so explain to me like what happens, like why not ship the gas? I mean, right now nothing is shipping or very little is moving through the strait. But why is the process such that the first step, the transformation of natural gas to urea happens at the source rather than later down somewhere else in the supply chain?

[Alexis Maxwell]

Yeah, so you'll find nitrogen fertilizer plants will often be co located with natural gas, because to ship natural gas you have to chill it to very low temperatures and it's very expensive to move it. In contrast, urea is, it's a granular. You can ship it as a bulk commodity item. It's much cheaper to do it that way and you can reach a vast number of people. You'll find urea plants around the world, but most of them are really located in places with low cost gas because this is a competitive commodity industry. So you'll see these plants in places like Russia, the Middle east, the United States and China.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of like aluminum. Like here is this thing that it's like, okay, you can ship it anywhere in the world. It's a lot easier to ship aluminum than it is to transport electricity via batteries. So you have the aluminum processing co located where you have cheap electricity. And then of course, it's sort of trivial to move it elsewhere. How much of the world's urea is in conflict affected regions right now?

[Alexis Maxwell]

I just want to add one thing too about the urea and why we ship it. It has a very strong seasonality. So you know, when you run a large chemical manufacturing plant, you want to capture the economies of scale and you want to run your plant 365 days a year. But the problem that we see in the fertilizer industry is that farmers only demand urea at a very short period of the year, let's just say like two months of the year. So that puts these manufacturers in a sort of classic snake and egg supply chain problem. What do you do with the material the rest of the year? So it's much easier to ship it out than it is to store it and keep it on hand for farmers 10 months out and to take that price risk.

[Tracy Alloway]

Oh wait, now I'm really interested. How storable is urea Actually, because I think about those little packets, they seem like they could last for quite a while.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, I assume they last a while.

[Alexis Maxwell]

Yeah. If you have urea and you can put it in a warehouse and you can have it covered from the rain and possibly other elements, you can probably keep it on hand for at least a couple of months, probably three, four, five months. However, you know, if you have a warehouse, the way that you really maximize the value of a warehouse is by turning the inventory in your warehouse and selling that. So when you put urea in a warehouse, you're taking on price risk over the period that it will sit in storage, and you're not using your warehouse for what it's really designed for. So a lot of what we see with these urea facilities, it's make and ship. There isn't a strategic reserve of urea the same way that we would have it, like in oil, for example, which is partially why this crisis is really compounding for urea. At this time of year, we don't have significant storage to replace what we're losing in the Middle East. Now, the Middle east, if we look at the countries that are located along the Persian Gulf, about 45% of the world's tradable urea comes from the Middle east, and about. About 20% of the ammonia comes from along the Middle east as well. So if you are in the business of trying to procure a replacement for what we've lost in the Middle east, there's not really a good next best alternative at this point in time. You could try going to Russia to procure material, but a lot of the west has sanctioned Russia and their fertilizer products. You could try going to China, but China has an export ban currently on their urea fertilizers, and that's done to protect their domestic industry and their farmers. And that really kind of leaves you left over with places like Egypt or maybe the United States.

[Joe Weisenthal]

So is most of the urea from the Middle east, is most of it going to Asia?

[Alexis Maxwell]

So the Middle east is a great supplier for urea. They ship effectively everywhere, every single day they're in the market. You know, a urea plant in the Middle east, just to keep their inventory sort of in balance, a lot of these producers are loading one vessel and shipping it every single day. And so where the shipments go from the Middle east depends on what time of year it is. So when farmers are demanding product, like European farmers or American farmers, in the second quarter, you'll see more of the Middle Eastern urea go there but in the second half of the year, you're going to see a lot more of the urea move to places like India and Brazil, places that have a flipped season to the Northern hemisphere and plant at a different time.

[Tracy Alloway]

Okay, this is my chance. What's the deal with fertilizer in Morocco? Because I remember when I was in Abu Dhabi, there were a lot of, you know, big national companies that were very excited about striking some sort of of fertilizer deals with Morocco. What's going on there?

[Alexis Maxwell]

Yeah. So Morocco is among the world's, one of the world's largest producers of phosphate. So phosphate is one of those critical NPK nutrients. Morocco is expanding their phosphate production and their low cost. And because of their location in Africa, it's relatively cheap freight to get it to move around the world. I think of phosphate to the Moroccan economy a little bit like oil to the Saudi economy.

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[Joe Weisenthal]

So if I'm looking at a 10 year chart of back to Egyptian but Egyptian urea prices, they soared to over eleven hundred dollars a metric ton in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That peak looks like around spring April 2022 they got down to about a little under $300ametric ton. In 2024 they're close to 600. Now before we get to the effects of what, 600 a ton urea, what the impact of that is, what was the impact on the 2022 price spike? What were the domino effects of that massive surge?

[Alexis Maxwell]

Yes, the 2022 price surge. It was really two supply side shocks. In 2021 China started their export ban on urea and phosphate fertilizers. And the importance of China to the fertilizer market, they really, it cannot be overstated. So China is the marginal producer for urea and phosphate. So generally speaking, when China is exporting fertilizers, prices globally will tend to fall. And when China is out of the market, prices rise to the next level of production costs. And so In September of 2021, when China slammed the door on exports, the world had to really scramble for alternatives to supply. And then when we had the Russian invasion into Ukraine in the first quarter of 2022, we saw fertilizer prices spike on top of that, because the world was unclear about how we could source fertilizers from Russia. So Russia is a high volume exporter, they're a low cost producer. And Russia also is probably really the only country that will do high volume exports of nitrogen, phosphate and potash. You name the flavor of fertilizer that you want, you can get it out of Russia. And so there was just this general surge in the industry to try to find an alternative. And I mentioned earlier that when we took China out of the market, fertilizer prices had to go above the marginal producer level, production costs in China, and bid in new supply. And the way that the nitrogen cost curve is oriented, that meant the world had to go to Europe to find new sources of nitrogen and turn those plants on in order to meet demand. Well, at the time, the price for natural gas in Europe, which is the feedstock for ammonia, and then eventually urea was surging over $60 per MMBtu. And so if you wanted to run the economics of what it costs to make ammonia, it's a very easy back of the napkin math to do this. It takes about 34 to 36 mmbtus of natural gas to produce one ton of ammonia. But if we needed 36 mmbtus to make ammonia, and I'm paying $60 for natural gas, I'm looking at an ammonia price that's over $2,100.

[Tracy Alloway]

So if I'm a farmer in the US right now and I am getting ready to plant spring wheat, what am I doing when I, you know, I'm hopefully I have a Bloomberg terminal that would be nice as a farmer, but I'm looking at the chart of the price spike in something like urea. What am I thinking to myself in terms of offsetting. Offsetting this cost?

[Alexis Maxwell]

Yeah. So farmers will have probably four options or decisions that they can make at this point. And I will tell you, I do think that US Farmers are probably best poised to weather this storm compared to farmers in, let's say the European Union or India at this point. If you're a farmer, what you can choose to do is you can reduce your application rates, you can switch what you're planting, let's say, from corn to shift into soybeans, which demands significantly less amounts of nitrogen. The third option is, as a US Farmer, you can switch among your nitrogen products, and then the last worst option is just not plant at all.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And what do you see happening right now? There was a headline, by the way, earlier that I saw. We're already senators in D.C. are hearing from farmers talking about wanting to get relief from wanting to get some sort of bailout. It's not as extreme, but, you know, the price is to some extent global. And so we see the new Orleans price, that's shooting up too. That's at £570 a ton.

[Alexis Maxwell]

Yeah. So this is really all, you know, as in economics, this is all really relative. So I want to just give some comments, context as to why, even though, you know, Egypt urea is like I think today close to $700, still below about 1/3 below the 22 price spike. What's happening now is probably the worst it's ever been for farmers looking to buy nitrogen. And we measure that in the industry by just looking at the urea price to the crop price ratio.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Oh, that makes sense.

[Alexis Maxwell]

Yeah. It's all relative. You know, that last incremental ton of nitrogen is going to give you a yield bump. So you can kind of, you want to run the economics and the agronomy on if I spend a little bit more on my nitrogen, am I going to get that yield bump? So I need to know what the price of the commodity is. And if I were today to look at the urea to corn price ratio.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Alexis Maxwell]

Last week it was at 124. The highest it's ever been is 143. And with the price surge that we're seeing again this week, I expect once we have prices settle on Friday, that we'll set a new record for the most expensive that urea has ever been to a foreign farmer.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Tracy, this is going to make a good chart in the newsletter because I just charted it as our guest was talking about it. And yes, we are very close to. So even though on the pure urea price not necessarily at all time highs, but relative to corn, we are very close to all time highs there.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, I think this is important. So the other thing I wanted to ask is you've heard, I mean, it's a running joke on this show that farmers are always complaining about something, but one of the things they've complained about is fertilizer prices. Even before the Iran situation, even before the 2022 price spike, there's been some grumbling what's going on in the structure of the market that seems to make fertilizer prices an issue for the farming industry.

[Alexis Maxwell]

Yeah. So the farming industry in the US right now is. Margins are incredibly thin. If we look at, for example, the difference between what farmers pay for their inputs versus the prices that they get for their agricultural products, it hit a record negative spread in January. There's a lot of price pain out there, the US farm economy. And we're seeing chapter 12 bankruptcies. Chapter 12 is a specialized form of bankruptcy for farms and fisheries. Starting to pick up here in 2025. So I'll say the economic pain is real. And if you look at fertilizer prices, they tend to cycle just like all other commodities. The last time we really saw an amplified price cycle for fertilizer was 07 and 08. Kind of in line with the financial crisis. But what makes this different is in contrast to, I think it was more of a demand cycle in 07 and 08 that caused the amplification. But this time this is a supply side crisis. I think about this as like a three legged stool. We've taken China out of the market, Russian supply seemed difficult to acquire, and now you throw in, we have this global choke point for urea in the Strait of Hormuz where almost, let's say, you know, 40% of the nitrogen that we need is, you can't get it. Those are the supply side drivers that are keeping fertilizer prices at mid cycle level for I think much longer than many in the industry would have expected when this started in 2020, 2021.

[Tracy Alloway]

When you say you can't get it, do you foresee a situation where you can't get it at any price? Basically.

[Alexis Maxwell]

Oh, Tracy, my, my econ professor would roll over in his grave if I ever said that. But I'll just kick it back to, you know, applying fertilizer. You know, you have to do it when the crop wants it. So that's really pre planting and during like early emergence of your crop, it's, you know, having a kid and needing to feed them, you know, vitamins at a certain point in there as they start to grow.

[Tracy Alloway]

That's right. Everyone knows after they're three years old, you don't have to feed them anymore. They fend for themselves.

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[Alexis Maxwell]

At that point you're on your own. Go fix me a hot dog. Yeah. So if you miss the urea application window, it's really difficult to go back or nearly impossible to go back and apply nitrogen. You just will have to take the yield penalty.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, again, just looking at the pure urea chart you mentioned, you know, some of the legs of the stool have already been kicked out. So the lowest it got after the invasion of Ukraine was still not anywhere close to say, pre Ukraine or pre pandemic levels at all. So we've shifted into a higher regime generally even before the war in Iran. So when we're talking about oil markets, we know that there's infrastructure that's already been destroyed. So even if the ship Strait of Hormuz has opened in a short time. There's infrastructure that's been damaged. And of course, we know wells have been shut in because they're running out of storage space for oil. What do we know about the fertilizer infrastructure, period, you know, the damage that's been done. And so, like, you know, say there was a miracle and suddenly things started flowing through the Strait of Hormuz immediately tomorrow, which doesn't seem very likely. What do we know just about the condition of the infrastructure and how long it would take things to get moving again?

[Alexis Maxwell]

Yeah, that's a great question. I think we'd be looking at least two weeks before you'd start to see fertilizer come out along the strait again. We haven't seen much in the way of these facilities being attacked directly.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Okay.

[Alexis Maxwell]

And so a lot of the manufacturing sites have shut down preemptively. And so then to restart a fertilizer facility, it's going to take two or three days of a natural gas burn just to get the plant to where it is producing urea again. And then you have to load. You have to bring a vessel in, you have to load the vessel, you have to get it back out. And, you know, nobody at this point has any clarity on when the straight reopens. Who gets first priority? Is it oil or is it fertilizer? Just going to guess. Oil. We'll get the priority. So, you know, once this has a clear end date, at least two to three weeks before we see fertilizer come back out of the Middle East.

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[Tracy Alloway]

IBM so obviously everything is still in flux and I should just add our standard disclaimer, which is we are recording this on March 10th and who knows what will happen by the time this episode comes out. But how do you anticipate this actually feeding into food prices? I mean, this is the big question. So people use less fertilizer, you get lower yields, supply goes down. I assume prices go up. Or you have farmers that continue to use fertilizer but it costs them a lot more and so they have to offset it with higher prices and prices still go up.

[Alexis Maxwell]

Yeah, I'll think about this in sort of a timeframe of when we might start to see some of this flow through the system. It's the relationship between fertilizer prices and when that piece of food arrives on your dinner plate. There's a lot of decisions and price inputs to how that all works. But so what we're thinking right now is we'll see that in fact the market's calling for a reduction of nitrogen application rates here in the US and so I'm looking at what I might expect from for US Corn yields to be this year. Last year we had a yield of 186 bushels per acre. I'm thinking at this point that we could see the US corn yield be 182 bushels. But again, we still have a long road of production potential ahead of us. A lot of the corn yield depends on what the weather looks like during the summer season, how soon farmers can get out there and plant. And then also you Know, the thing about commodity prices is they'll snap up. And then at these levels, you know, I mentioned earlier, this is a record. We were expecting to see a record urea to corn price ratio that will destroy a lot of urea demand. And so if the strait reopened next week, you know, you would see urea prices sort of snap back to before. Maybe you would see them snap back to where they were before this war. So thinking about, like, food production and the relationship with this. So we're planting now in the spring. I'm expecting lower yields for corn. For example, that corn isn't going to get harvested until probably about September or October of this year. And then it'll have to move to, say, a milling location or an ethanol plant. Lower yields is going to be something that will move through the food production system over a time span of about a year or two.

[Tracy Alloway]

All right, Alexis, thank you so much for coming on op Lots and finally letting us talk fertilizer. I wish it was under better circumstances, but this was absolutely fascinating. Thank you.

[Alexis Maxwell]

Well, thank you for having me. It was my pleasure.

[Tracy Alloway]

Joe. I'm never gonna look at one of those little packets that comes with flowers, fresh flowers, the same way again.

[Joe Weisenthal]

No, I, I couldn't. I never use those. I. No, maybe I. Maybe I put them in the water. I had no idea. But no, that was super interesting. And the sort of, the money chart for me was really seeing that urea to corn futures ratio, which is very clean and very elegant. And you can just see farmers are. How much stress they're already feeling and then how much additional stress they're seeing just in the last weeks. But there haven't really been good conditions for fertilizer costs really since the pandemic. It has seemed like, in particular since the war in Ukraine started this structural shift in supply.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah. So there are a few things that stood out to me. So, number one, tough times for farmers. And it's. It seems like in all these instances, the pain usually falls on the smaller scale farmers versus the big ones. I imagine in this particular situation, if you're a huge farmer out in Iowa or wherever, you probably have enough scale to ensure that you're still getting some sort of fertilizer. Those business relationships are going to help you versus, say, a small scale farmer who's like, making these decisions on an individual basis. The other thing that stood out to me, and we've heard this before in our oil discussion with Rory Johnston, this idea that, well, again, the big fare better. So the US Is probably going to make it out better than say in India, which means nat gas from the Middle east in order to make its own fertilizer.

[Alexis Maxwell]

And then the other thing that stood

[Tracy Alloway]

out to me was that idea of storage. So, yeah, we know that in commodities, storing something can cost a lot of money. And it seems like fertilizer in particular hasn't really been stored in the way maybe some other metals have been because, you know, most of the time you only need it, I guess twice a year, you know, once in the southern hemisphere and once in the northern hemisphere.

[Alexis Maxwell]

Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

It does not seem as though the supply chain has been optimized for sort of long term accumulation. There aren't strategic urea reserves the way there are with other commodity reserves. It's really going to be a mess. And you know, that was when we talked to Rory Johnston about energy. And you know, again, in the US it's going to show up mostly at higher prices in the pump. Elsewhere, it's going to show up as literally an unavailability, a reduction in the amount of energy, the amount of oil that's capable. It's really disturbing to think like, yeah, I mean, no one wants to pay higher groceries, but it's a lot better than outright famine, which is just the risk when you do such a massive shock to the food supply.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah. All right, shall we leave it there?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Let's leave it there.

[Tracy Alloway]

This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart, follow our producers Kerman Rodriguez at Kerman, Erman Dash o' Bennett at dashbot and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. And for more Odd Lots content, go to bloomberg.com oddlod where the Daily newsletter and all of our episodes and you can chat about all these topics 24. 7 in our Discord Discord GG oddlots.

[Tracy Alloway]

And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk fertilizer, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg Channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

[Alexis Maxwell]

Sam. Foreign.

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