Around last May, Facebook posts began circulating regarding an impending shortage of diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) due to various sinister reasons. DEF is required to be sprayed into diesel exhaust to neutralize nitrous oxides and filter particulate matter.
DEF is a mixture of urea and water, so the same factors such as natural gas prices that clobbered farmer fertilizer budgets also made DEF occasionally scarcer and much more expensive. The speed with which the economy roared back to life also caught suppliers off guard.
Remember the Great Trucker Shortage that promised impending doom, and then seemed to fade away. Snopes, the premier online fact-checker disassembled the DEF rumor, and my comments come largely from that source.
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The DEF shortage story centered on the largest users of DEF – truckers. In what has become a familiar pattern sequential supply chain problems are mentioned to present a plausible probability of a crippling DEF shortage about now. Perhaps it is harder to get in places, but our supplier, a huge coop not only filled our tank when we called, the salesman had heard nothing of any supply issues.
The rumor of rail problems, specifically the Union Pacific and their dispute with the largest truck stop operator – Pilot Flying J – were at the core of this predicted shortage. Supply issues did happen briefly in Australia and Korea but did not become a persistent problem.
While it is often mentioned we are the largest importer of urea, we manufacture most of what we need at home and import about a fourth of our needs. Unfortunately, truly unimagined supply and production problems have come to pass thanks to the pandemic and Ukraine war, so users may be applying the old tactic of getting while the getting is good. This exacerbates any distribution issues, of course.
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Note our tote is full, for example. An interesting side note is totes themselves are harder to find, and the days of your supplier providing one free are probably over. We upgraded a 14-year-old combine and with only one other tractor new enough to need DEF, decided our usage required something other than messing with plastic barrels.
There is currently no widespread shortage of DEF I could find evidence of. It is the price of everything I’ve been talking about that will be the real heartburn, I think.
What other issues are on John’s mind? You can read or watch both John’s World and Customer Support segments from U.S. Farm Report online.
