Photo: Alamy
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking action to mitigate the high cost of fertilizer, aiming to bring relief to countless American farmers.
“The high cost of fertilizer is not a new issue,” said USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins on Tuesday. “The cost of urea, potash, MAP, TAP, ammonia, and UAN all rose swiftly…in 2021 and for the rest of the Biden administration remained at roughly 55 percent higher than at the beginning of the Biden administration.”
Rollins said that the Trump administration had already begun efforts to lower fertilizer prices immediately in 2025. Recent events, however, have driven prices up again.
“Prices, of course, remain elevated after going down, but remain elevated due to the conflict overseas, but they are below what they were in late 2021, 2022, and early 2023,” she said.
The cost of fertilizer is a major concern for American farmers. Prices have skyrocketed due to the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz amid the war with Iran. The Strait is responsible for the free flow of up to one-third of the world’s fertilizer supply, according to the United Nations.
An alarming new survey from the American Farm Bureau Federation found that 70 percent of American farmers “say fertilizer is so expensive that they will not be able to buy all the fertilizer they need.”
Secretary Rollins praised President Trump for acting in April to extend a waiver on the Jones Act for an additional 90 days.
The Jones Act is a federal law that regulates maritime commerce in the U.S., requiring port-to-port vessel traffic to be U.S.-built, owned, and endorsed by the U.S. Coast Guard.
The waiver, Rollins said, has allowed 65,000 metric tons of fertilizer to be moved throughout U.S. ports. She also acknowledged waivers on import restrictions from Venezuela – with more announcements to come on that point.
To mitigate the U.S. dependence on foreign fertilizer supply, the USDA announced three major points of action.
First, the permitting process for the Blue Point Complex in Louisiana will be finished in roughly 45 days. This massive facility will be the world’s largest low-carbon “blue” ammonia production facility in the world upon its completion, Rollins said.
Second, the USDA is continuing to expedite Biden administration-era projects under FPEP, also known as the Fertilizer Production Expansion Program. She said that in 2025, the USDA, under the Trump administration, assessed that only eight of the more than 120 projects had been completed under Biden. Eventually, this will yield two million tons of new annual fertilizer capacity, amounting to 30 million acres covered by American-produced fertilizer, Rollins noted.
Third, the USDA is searching to hire a “Full Time Input Economist” to interface with their partners on Capitol Hill – key lawmakers – to increase transparency and efficiency within the agency.
The bottom line, according to Rollins, is that all these efforts combined should result in 4.5 million tons of fertilizer production annually, helping to support 400,000 producers and 290 million acres of domestic farmland.
“There’s so much more we can do, but this is an incredible, as I mentioned, first step,” she stated.
