The fertilizer market is bringing forward supply chain issues, pricing levels, and other dynamics in an unprecedented fashion.
“We came into 2025, thinking things might calm down–feel a little more steady, a little less volatile–and it’s been anything but,” says Josh Linville, vice president of fertilizer at StoneX. “Let’s just put this way, things are happening this spring we’ve never seen before.”
His top advice for farmers is stay focused on the movements in the market, be attentive and watch for opportunities.
“Farmers are not making a lot of money this year, and the forecast for 2026 doesn’t look good either,” he says. “Our natural pattern is to just stick our heads in the sand and hope it gets better. We cannot do that. Every single season, every single year, there are opportunities. Keep your head up. Keep the conversations going. Get frustrated, but don’t get so frustrated that you just shut down.”
Linville shares 5 watch points in the fertilizer market.
1. Two bright spots
Across the fertilizer industry, from the U.S. perspective, Linville sees two areas where there is some positivity in pricing: anhydrous ammonia and potash.
“Everything else has been, honestly, a little depressing,” Linville says. “Phosphate prices are sky hill. Urea prices are sky high.”
2. Sidedress pinch points
“The UAN situation is snug. We ended up having the perfect storm of events, and retailers are struggling to find any product that will ship in the month of May, and this has been going on since April,” Linville says.
He says shifts to urea for sidedress applications are being met with increased price for that product as well. So many farmers will at least look at anhydrous as an alternative.
“Farmers are resilient. They all try different things. They’ll get to the end of the road–they’ll get this thing planted, they’ll get it fertilized, they’ll get it raised,” he says.
3. Chinese exports carry major sway in the market
Whereas China previously exported between 5 and 6 million tons of year of urea, in 2024, the country exported 266,000 tons.
“It was the shock of the century,” Linville says. “And in the first quarter of 2025—January, February, March—it’s been 3,600 tons. That is not an error; I’m not missing a couple of zeroes—3600 tons. You come off a really dismal 2024, and you start ’25 this way, and the world is trying to figure out what it’s supposed to do going forward.”
Linville says he hears reports of solid Chinese stockpiles at perhaps record levels.
4. There are other urea exporters to watch
When asked if he’s worried about losing exports of urea from Iran—the world’s third biggest exporter–Linville responds, “very.”
“We spend a tremendous amount of time trying to figure out what China is going to do, and when you bring Iran into the conversation, it’s short-sighted to just reply you don’t care to buy from them,” he says. “If they shut down exports, and we lost 4.8 million tons, that’s likely losing another China.”
5. Russia and Ukraine are on the watchlist
As both key agricultural input markets, Russia and Ukraine remain at the top of the list to watch. With the recent Trump administration deal on rare earth minerals with Ukraine, Linville says this underscores where to train our eyes.
“I’m not sure just what the response from Russia is going to be,” Linville says. “That’s obviously a major, major watch point.”
In 2020, Russia and Belarus together added up to provide about 20% of the global supplies of nitrogen, phosphate and potash.
