For the first time since 1984, a new phosphate fertilizer plant is planned in the U.S. Under a plan unveiled Wednesday, CHS and OCP North America announced a 50-50 joint venture to build and operate a phosphate fertilizer production facility at the Cornerstone Energy Park in Waggaman, La.
CHS President and CEO Jay Debertin said the strategic case is straightforward: the United States imports too much of a product that farmers need inside an unforgiving window. He says the payoff for growers comes down to something they feel every spring: control over when the product actually shows up.
“This will cut roughly in half the amount of finished phosphate fertilizer products imported into the United States,” Debertin says. The country uses about 2.5 million tons a year, he said, “and about 40 to 60 percent of that, depending on the year, is imported, and this will cut it in half.”
The plant would be sized to produce up to 1.3 million tons of phosphate-based fertilizer a year. Each company is responsible for about half of the roughly $450 million investment.
Why Louisiana, And Why Now
The location puts fertilizer production at the intersection of where raw materials are received and where they can be shipped to farmers.
“Frankly, that’s where the transportation of the ships that come into the United States carrying the raw material are best positioned to unload,” Debertin says. “The manufacturing is located right there.”
Under the venture, OCP Group, the Morocco-based parent of OCP North America, would supply phosphoric acid — drawing on the company’s global phosphate resources — and the Waggaman facility would turn it into finished product. Those finished fertilizers would then be distributed through both OCP North America and the CHS wholesale and retail crop nutrients network, which reaches cooperatives, retailers and farmers across the country. The Cornerstone site’s access to the Mississippi River system was a key part of the appeal.
For Debertin, the real vulnerability in the current system isn’t just how much fertilizer is imported — it’s the timing risk that comes with relying on it.
“The windows of when this product is needed [are] so tight that frankly if you’re three weeks late getting imports you might as well not get them because you miss the window,” he says. “This is just going to increase the security of supply for U.S. farmers and U.S. agriculture.”
USDA’s Focus on Fertilizer
That framing echoes the reasons the deal drew a heavyweight political rollout. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry all appeared at the announcement to cast the project as part of a broader push to reshore fertilizer manufacturing.
The partners hope to break ground in the first or second calendar quarter of 2027, and — if that timeline holds — to finish construction by the end of 2028 or the beginning of 2029.
The project aligns with a federal priority to expand domestic fertilizer capacity, and the companies have applied for funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Fertilizer Investment & Expansion for Long-term Domestic Supply, or FIELDS, program. But Debertin was careful not to overstate where that stands.
“USDA has not awarded anything yet,” Debertin says. “They’re supportive of the project, but I don’t want to get in front of their analysis and their work to determine if we’re going to be eligible for an award.”
He credited the administration and the state for smoothing the path in other ways. “When it comes to permitting [the administration] has been very, very helpful,” he says, adding that Louisiana officials have looked for “ways to help the process to get the construction started.”
At the announcement, USDA officials leaned into the market-competition angle. Vaden — a former U.S. Court of International Trade judge and himself a Tennessee farmer — argued that a new domestic entrant would do more than add tons; it would add pressure on price.
The plant “will pump out something even more important: true competition for the American farmer’s dollar as a new entry comes to play to battle for their business,” Vaden said. He said farmers had “grown frustrated, cynical about hearing promises year after year,” noting that for phosphate, “the only thing farmers could depend upon” was that “the price always went up.”
Rollins tied the project to national security. “If we can’t feed or fuel ourselves there will be no America for the future,” she said.
Gov. Landry made a similar case, telling the crowd that “a country that cannot feed itself cannot sustain itself” and casting farmers as “the first line of defense when it comes to national security.”
The plant itself, of course, won’t affect a single fall season for years. But Debertin’s pitch is that once it’s running, American farmers will have something they haven’t had in a generation: more finished phosphate made at home, and more say over how and when it reaches the field.
