With only weeks until spring planting on both sides of the border gets underway, Canadian and U.S. farmers, already facing low grain prices, are bracing for another economic blow: even bigger fertilizer bills amid a North American trade war.
Some farming supply costs already turned sharply higher due to trade tensions between the U.S. and Canada. After threatening tariffs for months, U.S. President Donald Trump enacted 25 per cent duties on most Canadian products on Tuesday before announcing a one-month reprieve on some goods, including fertilizers, on Thursday.Canada said on Thursday it will delay a planned second wave of retaliatory tariffs until April 2.
Many U.S. farmers need to add potassium to their soils, so they use potash fertilizer – much of which comes from the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Canadian farmers in turn often need to add phosphorus to their soils, so they buy phosphate – much of which comes from Florida.
Saskatchewan farmer Scott Hepworth, who has already been paying high prices for the U.S. phosphate fertilizer he uses to help his canola and wheat fields flourish, now fears prices could spike more due to the trade war.
“When will this end? How bad will this get?” said Hepworth, as he gathered with other farmers at the Canadian Crops Convention on March 5.
Fertilizer is most farmers’ biggest input cost. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that 22 per cent of total corn production costs come from fertilizer, and that includes labor, machinery and overhead expenses.
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The price of potash has risen from US$303 per short ton on Jan. 3 to US$348 on February 28 ahead of the tariffs.
“Potash has seen price strength in all the confusion (and) fear of the tariffs,” said fertilizer analyst Josh Linville of StoneX. “There were strong fundamental reasons for potash prices to rise, but it was the tariff fears that eventually caught up with it.”
Phosphate prices are harder to estimate but have surged, analysts said, since hurricanes hit the Florida mines and facilities that make the product. Prices in Canada could rise if further Canadian retaliatory tariffs are imposed.
Bigger fertilizer bills
The U.S. imports 90 per cent of the potash its farmers use, with 80 per cent of those imports coming from nearby Canada, and it cannot replace that with domestic production.
“Full pass-through of the 25 per cent tariff could increase prices by more than US$100 per ton for (potash) supplies sourced from Canada,” said a February 4 analysis by a team from the University of Illinois and Ohio State University.
Farmers only make money on the difference between what they pay to grow a crop and what they can sell it for, so increasing costs by US$100 per ton would be a major hit on farmer incomes.
While Canada is not the only potash supplier to the U.S., it is the closest. Russia and Belarus are the other major players, but they have been affected by the war in Ukraine, with sanctions and port bans hurting those countries’ ability to export product.
Canada imports phosphate from the U.S., with other sources like Morocco distant and difficult to receive product from. If Canada imposes tariffs on U.S. phosphate, that would raise prices for Canadian importers and farmers.
Fertilizer companies from Canada rushed to get potash supplies to U.S. wholesalers before the tariffs were imposed, so U.S. farmers should have sufficient supply for early spring planting, some analysts say. But they will have to pay the retailers higher prices.
“The fertilizer industry has known this is coming since November, so they’ve been prepared, and now they’re just bracing to see how this plays out,” said analyst Mark Milam of ICIS, a commodity analytics firm.
One fertilizer company executive warned U.S. farmers should be prepared for fertilizer prices to jump as much as 25 per cent.
“We believe that the cost of tariffs will be passed on to the U.S. farmer,” Ken Seitz, the president and CEO of Nutrien, said at the BMO Global Metals, Mining and Critical Minerals Conference on Feb. 25.
–Reporting by Ed White; Additional reporting by Patricia Weiss in Frankfurt, Germany and Tristan Veyet in Gdansk, Poland; Editing by PJ Huffstutter, Caroline Stauffer and Marguerita Choy
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