Todd Littleton, a third-generation Tennessee farmer, saw his fertilizer bill jump $100,000 this spring — a 40% increase — and that hit has ripple effects far beyond his fields.

Todd Littleton farms in Gibson County and the bill shock landed hard: his fertilizer cost jumped $100,000, a 40% spike from last year. “The problem is, we’re so strained financially coming into this issue,” he said, and you can hear it in every budget line on that farm. That single reality drives the rest of this story.

No one on Littleton’s farm started a war 7,000 miles away, and he didn’t close the Strait of Hormuz. Yet when a conflict touches a critical shipping lane, the cost shows up on American fields and in American wallets. Those costs stick around even if shooting pauses.

From a Republican perspective, confronting threats that aim for nukes and choke global trade is right policy, and President Trump moved to do exactly that. He suspended the attack for two weeks on the condition Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz, but whether the fighting stops tomorrow or fourteen days from now, the economic damage to agriculture is already locked in. The real question is how quickly Washington retools to protect farmers and consumers.

The Strait of Hormuz moves more than oil; it funnels critical fertilizer components. About 43% of globally traded urea, 27% of ammonia, and half of sulfur exports transit that chokepoint, and disruptions there put huge strain on supply. The market proved fragile: the port price for urea jumped from $475 per metric ton to $680 by mid-March, a lightning-fast move that exposed thin inventories.

The United States imports roughly 17% of its urea and about 20% of its phosphate fertilizer from Persian Gulf sources. Being “not the worst off” in the global mix doesn’t cut it when spring planting is on the line. During planting season, being “exposed enough” is more than enough to cause real problems on farms across the country.

Fertilizer isn’t an abstract line item; it eats up 33% to 45% of operating costs for corn and wheat farmers, and half of all nitrogen fertilizer is spread in spring. That timing made the Hormuz disruption particularly painful this year. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says “80% of farmers locked in fertilizer prices last fall”, which helped many but left the remaining 20% vulnerable — exactly where stories like Littleton’s come from.

The administration moved quickly with $12 billion in one-time relief payments, and that was a necessary early step. On the math, it translates to roughly $44 per acre for corn while production costs run around $900 per acre, so the shortfall is substantial for those who didn’t hedge. This response shows care, but it doesn’t erase the scale of the gap farmers are facing.

Farm finances were already strained before the crisis. Net farm income peaked at $182 billion in 2022 and dropped to about $140 billion by 2024, a 23% decline in two years. The 2025 numbers looked better only because emergency government payments added $30.5 billion; strip those out and the sector was running on thinner margins before the missiles ever flew.

Expect grocery prices to reflect this lagged reality by late summer. The USDA forecasted food prices up 3.6% in 2026, with beef rising 10.1% and sugar up 9.8%, and those projections came before the worst of the Hormuz disruption. The war began five weeks ago, and the fertilizer cost shock farmers face now typically shows up in store prices months later, so families should brace for pressure at the checkout.

Jamie Dimon labeled rising inflation “the skunk at the party” and warned of risks that resemble tectonic shifts, and he called geopolitical moves “like tectonic plates, always moving and periodically causing earthquakes.” The economy isn’t cushioned the way it was: pandemic relief, excess household savings, surging AI investment, and Fed flexibility are largely spent or exhausted. That means we need faster, concrete fixes.

The supply-side answer is straightforward and within reach. China supplies over 30% of the world’s nitrogen fertilizer, Morocco controls about 70% of known phosphate reserves, and Russia, Belarus, and Canada account for roughly 77% of potash exports. About a third of the fertilizer Americans use is imported, recreating the old energy vulnerability before the shale boom fixed that problem.

We solved energy with American production, and we can do the same for fertilizer. U.S. ammonia plants are running at about 80% capacity, leaving roughly 20% idle, which translates into roughly 2.8 million metric tons that could be brought online without building new facilities. Much of that capacity sits in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma next to cheap natural gas, so the raw inputs and infrastructure are already in place.

Policy tools and funding exist to speed this up. The President invoked the Defense Production Act for phosphorus on February 18, and the next sensible step is extending that authority to ammonia and urea. The USDA’s Fertilizer Production Expansion Program already has $900 million in authorized funding with hundreds of millions unspent, and private firms are stepping up — including a $4 billion ammonia facility under construction that will yield 1.4 million metric tons per year.

The administration has made real moves: work with input companies to hold prices, expand import channels, and the high lock-in rate shows last fall’s push to hedge helped. Now it’s time to activate idle capacity, extend DPA authority to cover the fertilizers farmers actually use, and deploy existing funding at scale. Wars have costs, but a serious country fights and fixes the fallout at the same time.