Walk into any coffee shop in farm country this year, and you’ll hear the same words: collusion, price fixing and monopoly. Producers are angry about fertilizer costs, and I understand why. But after years of studying this industry — traveling the global supply chains, walking the plants and talking to the people who actually make this stuff — I’ve reached a conclusion that won’t win applause at the county meeting: Our anger is aimed at the wrong target.
I used to share the suspicion. Then I started digging into the global fertilizer market, and I learned something most critics never bother to learn: Fertilizers aren’t just one industry. They are the output of a dozen industries – sulfur, natural gas, shipping, mining and energy — colliding across continents, none of which any single fertilizer company controls.
Oversight from the FTC and DOJ is appropriate, and regulators should watch closely. But endless investigations and political theater don’t lower input costs; they just add expense that lands on farmers, then consumers.
Take Phosphorus. To produce MAP or DAP fertilizer, you need sulfuric acid, which requires sulfur. At the start of 2025, sulfur ran about $145 a ton. It peaked near $1,200. Why? Because China, Morocco, Indonesia India, and Brazil are all competing for a global sulfur supply that shrank 75% compared to what was available just weeks earlier — squeezed by nickel leaching and copper refining. That is not a boardroom conspiracy. That is global demand.
And here’s the truth that gets lost in the shouting: Farmers and fertilizer producers need each other. Farmers need transparent, affordable and reliable supply and pricing. Fertilizer companies need profitable farmers who can still afford to buy their product. Neither side survives without the other — yet somewhere along the way, that interdependence got buried under a pile of political flashpoints.
Some farmers are now calling for export controls. Others want profit-margin caps imposed from Washington. Let’s call that what it is: not free-market agriculture, but creeping socialism. I don’t know a single grower who actually wants a bureaucrat setting his margins or deciding what he can ship overseas. Investigations don’t grow crops. Keyboard warriors don’t lower input costs. All they do is drive a wedge between farmers and the industry that serves them. What we actually need is dialogue — a real conversation about what’s driving costs, one that’s been missing for years.
My family has farmed both in the United States and in Argentina, and that split perspective sharpens the picture. Look to Brazil: the world’s fourth-largest fertilizer consumer, importing nearly 90 percent of what it uses, watching every shipment cross an ocean, clear a bottlenecked port, and crawl inland on roads built for a different century. A single currency swing can reprice a shipment before it ever reaches the farm gate.
America doesn’t live that way. We run one of the most reliable fertilizer systems on the planet, one that typically trades at a discount to our global competitors. Domestic producers have poured billions into modern plants built around our regulatory framework. And contrary to the popular narrative, real competition exists: Over 100 companies supply nutrients to U.S. agriculture, more than 60 for nitrogen alone, nearly 35 for phosphate and roughly 11 for potash. That’s not a market being quietly cornered. That’s a market with genuine depth.
No farmer likes paying more for fertilizer — I certainly don’t, and I’ve asked the hard questions myself. But “price gouging” is a lazy label for a genuinely complex global market, and it unfairly vilifies companies putting real capital into keeping American agriculture supplied.
I’ve farmed on two continents and worked in dozens more as U.S. Ambassador to the UN’s food and agriculture agencies. I’ve seen what happens when a nation can’t feed its own people. America is nowhere close to that — and we should fight like hell to keep it that way.
What we’ve built is worth protecting, and worth improving. But the path forward is dialogue, not litigation. Litigation is expensive. Dialogue works. It’s time American agriculture chooses the path that strengthens it rather than tears it apart.
Kip Tom is a seventh-generation Indiana farmer and former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Rome-based food and agriculture agencies.
