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The Harvest Is Already Decided

Jan Gunash · Co-Founder & CGO · April 20, 2026

The best questions are not always the comfortable ones. Like: when we say the Hormuz crisis is an energy shock, what are we missing? And what happens when the part of the crisis that nobody is tracking reaches a farmer's field six months from now, long after the ceasefire headlines have moved on?

These are not hypothetical questions. The fertilizer crisis is already underway. The data systems that should have seen it coming did not exist. And the lag between the supply shock and its consequences is precisely long enough to make it invisible to most of the institutions responsible for responding to it.

The Crop That Does Not Know the War Has Started

Corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans do not follow geopolitical news. They respond to what goes into the soil in spring. Nitrogen, applied at the right time in the right quantities, is the single most important input determining what a harvest looks like in autumn. You cannot skip a season of nitrogen. You cannot make it up in June if it was not there in April. Unlike potash or phosphates, which can be deferred, nitrogen fertilizer must reach the field during the planting window or the yield loss is locked in (source: CNBC / Ninety One).

That window is open right now. And the fertilizer is not arriving.

About one third of globally traded fertilizer, including nearly half of globally traded urea, the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer, normally transits the Strait of Hormuz (source: Al Jazeera / UN). Since February 28, that corridor has been effectively closed. The Gulf region produces approximately 49% of global urea exports and around 30% of global ammonia exports (source: Alcott Global / American Farm Bureau Federation). Qatar Fertiliser Company alone supplies roughly 14% of the world's urea (source: Al Jazeera). All of it is sitting behind a closed gate.

The Price Signal Nobody Planned For

The price movement has been swift and significant. Urea prices in Egypt, one of the most widely watched benchmarks for nitrogen fertilizers, jumped from $400 to $490 before the war to around $700 per metric ton within weeks (source: CNBC / Argus). In the U.S., some fertilizer prices rose more than 40% in a single month (source: Fortune). Oxford Economics raised its fertilizer price forecast by 20% for the second quarter of 2026 within days of the Hormuz closure (source: Alcott Global). Wolfe Research has estimated the disruption could raise food-at-home inflation by roughly two percentage points in the U.S. market alone.

But here is the thing about fertilizer price signals: they arrive late and travel slowly. The cascade runs in four stages. Fertilizer prices rise, increasing agricultural input costs. Farmers reduce application rates or switch to less fertilizer-intensive crops. Yields fall for nitrogen-dependent staples. Food commodity prices follow the yield reduction with a six to nine month lag (source: Alcott Global). By the time the pressure is visible in procurement data or on a grocery shelf, the input decision that determined the outcome was made a growing season earlier.

FAO projections indicate that global fertilizer prices could average 15 to 20 percent higher in the first half of 2026 if the crisis persists. If disruption lasts three months or more, the risks escalate significantly, affecting global planting decisions for 2026 and beyond (source: FAO). Crop yields in India and Brazil are already expected to be lower than normal this year. East African farmers who were already struggling to afford fertilizer before the crisis face the sharpest reductions (source: Fortune).

The Compounding Problem

The Hormuz closure is not the only pressure point. Russia suspended exports of ammonium nitrate to protect its domestic supply. China, the world's largest phosphate producer, blocked phosphate exports, removing approximately 25% of global phosphate supply from international markets (source: Fortune). Three of the world's major fertilizer exporters are simultaneously restricting supply for different reasons, in the same season that Northern Hemisphere farmers need to plant.

Fertilizer production is also directly tied to the price of natural gas. Natural gas determines 70 to 90% of the cost of producing nitrogen fertilizer (source: Fortune). With Gulf LNG production disrupted, the feedstock costs for fertilizer producers outside the Gulf are rising at the same time that Gulf supplies are unavailable. The squeeze comes from both ends simultaneously.

The Data Infrastructure That Was Never Built

This is the part of the story that connects directly to the thread running through this newsletter series. The oil market has strategic reserves coordinated by 32 nations, released in the largest emergency action in IEA history. The helium market has no reserve and no monitoring framework. The sulfur market has no benchmark and no early warning system. And the fertilizer market has something that is arguably even more dangerous: a data infrastructure so thin that bipartisan legislation had to be introduced in the U.S. Congress this month just to require the USDA to publish fertilizer prices online on a weekly basis.

That bill, the Fertilizer Transparency Act, introduced by Congressmen Brad Finstad and Dusty Johnson with companion Senate legislation, would require the USDA to report fertilizer prices publicly every week (source: AgTech Navigator). The fact that this does not already happen is itself a data point. G7 countries maintain strategic petroleum reserves equivalent to 90 days of consumption. There are no internationally coordinated strategic fertilizer reserves. The pipeline Saudi Arabia built to bypass the Strait of Hormuz is for oil, not ammonia (source: Carnegie Endowment).

Unlike oil futures, fertilizer futures contracts are less liquid and prices are more opaque. There is no single globally recognised benchmark for urea the way Brent is a benchmark for crude oil. Production data is patchy. Export restriction announcements arrive without warning. The visibility problem, as one supply chain research firm put it, is that the pressure enters at tier three or four of the supply chain and takes months to surface at the tier one level where most monitoring is focused (source: Alcott Global).

The Six to Nine Month Clock

There is a specific and uncomfortable arithmetic to fertilizer shocks. A farmer who reduces nitrogen application in April 2026 because the price has doubled or the supply is unavailable will harvest a smaller crop in October. That smaller harvest will push food commodity prices higher in late 2026. Those higher commodity prices will reach supermarket shelves in early 2027. The inflation that consumers feel in the first quarter of 2027 was determined by a supply chain decision made in the spring of 2026, shaped by a geopolitical event that happened in February, in a market with almost no public data infrastructure to track any of it in real time.

The FAO Chief Economist put the scale of the disruption plainly: 30 to 35% of crude oil is not moving, 20% of natural gas is not moving, and between 20 and 30% of fertilizers are not moving (source: UN News). That is a simultaneous shock to energy, feedstocks, and agricultural inputs. The response mechanisms for energy, imperfect as they are, exist. For fertilizer they do not.

The Path Forward

The Fertilizer Transparency Act is a start, but weekly USDA price reporting is a floor, not a ceiling. What the fertilizer system needs is the same infrastructure that every other critical commodity eventually acquires after a crisis exposes its absence: a real-time price benchmark, standardised production and export reporting across major producing countries, and an internationally coordinated strategic reserve framework that treats fertilizer as the food security infrastructure it actually is.

AI and satellite tools exist that can begin to fill some of these gaps. Remote sensing platforms can already estimate crop stress and yield forecasts from space. Machine learning models are being applied to fertilizer demand forecasting and soil nutrient management. But these tools are learning from data that is itself incomplete, delayed, and unevenly distributed across the countries that are most exposed (source: Carnegie Endowment / FAO).

The pattern repeating through this newsletter series is now visible in agriculture with the same clarity it showed in minerals, helium, sulfur, and climate monitoring. Consequential decisions are being made on incomplete information. The supply chains beneath the food system are as opaque as the supply chains beneath the energy system. And the lag between the shock and its consequences is long enough that by the time the data makes the problem visible, the decisions that shaped it have already been made.

The crop does not know the war has started. But it will know, come harvest time, that the data systems did not either.

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Want to contribute your thoughts or findings in data and AI with climate, energy, or nature? Message Jan Gunash on LinkedIn or send an email to jgunash@projectcoeus.com.