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Fertilizer
Supplies are at About 50%, Time to Employ the 4Rs
By RHONDA
BROOKS March 11, 2022
As U.S. farmers evaluated fertility needs,
prices and prepay opportunities this past December – and wondered
whether to delay purchases, hoping prices might improve before
planting season – Corey Rosenbusch was doing a similar evaluation.
“I would have never dreamed where we’d be
three months later,” says Rosenbusch, president and CEO of The
Fertilizer Institute. “There’s even more than we anticipated, and it
just keeps layering on.”
Based on what industry members tell him,
Rosenbusch says an “anecdotal” estimate is 50% of the fertilizer
products farmers will need this spring are in U.S. warehouses and
distribution facilities.
“We’re by no means completely at that 100%
mark of having everything that’s needed,” he told Farm Journal during
a conversation at the 2022 Commodity Classic.
“The question is, what’s next? What should
we be preparing for?” he adds.
Grab The ‘Bull’ By
Its Horns
Farmers can’t fix the situation with fertilizer availability and high
input cost, but they can get a better grasp on their crop fertility
requirements, even now.
Rosenbusch advises farmers to lean on
retailers and other agronomic advisors to help them be as efficient
with products as possible.
And, once the ground thaws, he says go pull
soil samples and find out what they tell you.
“If you're not soil sampling, if you're not
using variable rate application, if you're not using the 4R
stewardship principles to be as efficient as possible with your
fertilizer, now is the time to do it,” he says. “If there’s any bright
light in the current market situation it’s that it really will drive
farmers to adopt and use these nutrient stewardship principles in
their farm.”
On The Near
Horizon
As he evaluates the current fertilizer
situation, Rosenbusch says the U.S. still faces potential challenges
getting products brought into the country. At play are what he calls
“correlated effects” – multiple factors in the marketplace that
influence each other – that combined make the upcoming planting season
so concerning.
Two unique, potential factors that might yet
come into play this season and impact fertilizer supplies for U.S.
farmers:
1. A potential CP
railway strike in Canada. The U.S. gets 80% of its potash from its
northern neighbor, Rosenbusch says. A rail strike could mean zero
product would come across the border and into the U.S.
In a March 7 letter to President Joe Biden,
The Fertilizer Institute, the National Grain and Feed Association, and
19 other members of the Agricultural Transportation Working Group
requested the administration work with the Canadian government to
avert a major railway labor strike and to rescind the cross-border
vaccine mandate for workers moving essential commerce.
“We've done everything we can to urge the
White House of the serious nature of this coming into the spring
season,” Rosenbusch says. “We've got our partners in Ottawa, urging
the Canadian government to get involved, because that would be a huge
supply disruption to the market if something like that happens.”
2. A domino effect
created by a lack of access to natural gas. Russia supplies the
lion’s share of natural gas to Europe. That matters to the U.S.,
because nitrogen production is based on natural gas.
“So, if we are looking at a major
curtailment of European nitrogen production, that is going to have,
you know, significant global nitrogen ramifications,” Rosenbusch
explains.
How that could potentially play out in the
U.S. is farmers might have access to nitrogen but it might not be in
the form they want or are accustomed to using.
“You might not find it as UAN, and you’ll
have to use urea instead,” Rosenbusch says, as a for instance. “So, we
will definitely need to have some flexibility in terms of the type of
product to achieve your nitrogen requirements.”
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