Corn Growers Tackle Rising Fertilizer Costs

By Lesly McNitt

Spring has sprung in the nation’s capital. The sun is shining. Plants and flowers are blooming. Weekend marathons are happening across the city. Yet the discussions taking place in the halls of power here are a reminder that all is not rosy across the country and around the world.

As the conflict in the Middle East rages on, and the Strait of Hormuz remains all but closed, growers are feeling the pinch as diesel fuel and fertilizer prices climb higher and become harder to attain. But if nothing else, the conflict is also exposing structural problems in the highly concentrated fertilizer industry that plagued growers well before the strait was closed.

America’s corn growers are entering the fourth year of negative returns, and input costs, including fertilizers, have long been too high. The National Corn Growers Association has worked to address these problems by encouraging Congress and the White House to open more domestic and international demand and by launching NCGA’s Input Task Force, which is charged with getting to the bottom of why input costs are so high and developing recommendations that can help address root causes. NCGA has been leading the charge to elevate these issues with the federal government as well.

While we have seen forward movement on many of our policy and regulatory priorities, we continue to hit a brick wall as we have called on U.S. – based fertilizer conglomerates, J.R. Simplot and Mosaic Company, to do their part in addressing higher prices.

In 2020, Mosaic petitioned the U.S. International Trade Commission to place duties on phosphate fertilizers imported from Morocco. Simplot supported the petition. Both companies said the Moroccan supplier was engaging in harmful trade practices. ITC quickly granted the petition, and duties on phosphate imports from Morocco soon shut this source of phosphate out of our market.

The result? Fertilizer became harder to find and pay for. Prior to the countervailing duties, Morocco had been supplying 42 percent of phosphate imported into the U.S. Texas A&M estimates that from 2021 to 2025, American farmers paid an extra $6.9 billion in fertilizer costs as a result of the additional duties forcing supply chains to look elsewhere.

NCGA attempted to influence the ITC’s decision back in 2020, and we are engaging once again, as the ITC begins a “sunset review” of these duties. We have also exerted significant public pressure on the companies to drop their request for these duties. Those calls grew more urgent after the start of the conflict in the Middle East put additional pressure on fertilizer supplies. Surely, we thought, these two highly profitable companies – the CEO of Mosaic, alone, makes $9 million a year – would see the hardship they were causing to their customers and relent. But much to our dismay, both companies recently reupped their calls to continue and even increase the tariffs.

NCGA’s response was quick and forceful. Our CEO called out their greed in media interviews and our NCGA President Jed Bower wrote an op-ed, which ran in a prominent Washington publication, taking the companies to task and calling on ITC to reverse its decision to place duties on these products.

We have also worked closely with Trump administration officials and members of Congress on this issue. And we’re seeing results. The Trump administration is reportedly scrutinizing the companies’ practices and working on actions to help ease constraints on fertilizer access. The administration has already exempted a number of critical fertilizer imports from other tariffs. Our allies in Congress have become increasingly engaged on this issue as well, introducing several recent bills to provide more fertilizer price transparency and discovery and to incentivize diversified domestic fertilizer production.  NCGA is also working on a bill that would remove the duties on phosphate imports from Morocco.

We continue to urge ITC to remove the countervailing duties at the conclusion of its sunset review. You can help us continue this fight by talking with members of your state’s U.S. congressional delegation about this issue. And, as always, if you are not already a member of your state corn grower group, we encourage you to join and get involved.

NCGA is committed to this cause – returning profitability to the American corn farmer. On the cost of production side of that equation, fair, transparent, and competitive input markets are critical. We want agricultural corporations to succeed, but not at the cost of American farmers’ livelihoods.

McNitt is the vice president of public policy at the National Corn Growers Association.