On farms across the United States and beyond, producers who are still reeling from U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade chaos are now bracing for yet another big shock from his war in Iran.

The United States and Israel’s sweeping military campaign against Iran has triggered a widening war now reverberating across the entire Middle East, which is a crucial hub of fertilizer production and is already seeing shuttered fertilizer plants that have sent prices spiking.

On farms across the United States and beyond, producers who are still reeling from U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade chaos are now bracing for yet another big shock from his war in Iran.

The United States and Israel’s sweeping military campaign against Iran has triggered a widening war now reverberating across the entire Middle East, which is a crucial hub of fertilizer production and is already seeing shuttered fertilizer plants that have sent prices spiking.

The war has also effectively halted any transit through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital maritime chokepoint and key shipping route in the fertilizer trade, promising even more pain for farmers worldwide. Between 20 and 30 percent of global fertilizer exports, as well as 20 percent of global exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG)—a key fertilizer feedstock—typically cross through the strait.

“Fertilizer prices were already high, and farmers were already pinched. So this will hurt,” Christopher Barrett, an agricultural economist at Cornell University, said in an email to Foreign Policy.

It’s been a rough year for U.S. farmers—one of Trump’s key voter bases. For months, they have suffered under his trade war and risked deeper global market share losses, prompting the Trump administration to give them a $12 billion bailout late last year. The number of small-business bankruptcies filed by farmers and fishers soared to a five-year high in 2025, in a sign of just how challenging the economic environment has become for farmers across the United States.

“The sector’s really been struggling,” said Joseph Glauber, a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture who is now at the International Food Policy Research Institute.

The Iran war threatens to compound those economic pressures. By waging war against Tehran now, the Trump administration is driving turmoil in a region essential to the fertilizer and energy trade. Those disruptions are shocking markets at a particularly bad time for farmers across the Northern Hemisphere, who are now preparing to apply fertilizer for the spring.

“A sudden drop in fertilizer supply at the time it is most valuable coupled with higher delivery costs will drive up fertilizer prices during spring planting,” said Barrett, who called it a “double whammy for growers.”

The widening conflict is already drawing alarm from the industry. On Monday, the American Farm Bureau Federation, one of the United States’ biggest agricultural lobbying groups, warned that prolonged disruptions in the Middle East could have implications for U.S. food security and prices.

“If farmers are unable to obtain the remaining supplies in time, we could see reductions or shifts in planted acreage and lower yields, which affects our nation’s food security and the affordability of essential goods,” the Farm Bureau said. While the Trump administration has announced plans to help safeguard the transit of fuel shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, the Farm Bureau said, those protections must be expanded to include agricultural inputs such as fertilizer.

“This timing matters because fertilizer purchasing, field preparation and early season fertilizer applications are already underway, limiting farmers’ ability to adjust if input prices spike suddenly,” the group added.

For that reason, farmers in the United States and around the world are closely following developments in the Middle East. The region is a key hub for nitrogen fertilizers—such as urea—which collectively fuel about half of the world’s food production.

The Middle East powers about 40 percent of global urea exports and 20 percent of global exports of ammonia, a key fertilizer input, much of which originates behind the Strait of Hormuz, according to Tommaso Pellegrinelli, a senior research analyst at the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie. That export capacity is being “held hostage in the area” due to the standstill in the strait, he said.

And pressures on the natural gas market have only worsened the outlook for the fertilizer sector. Natural gas prices spiked on Monday as the war continued to escalate and as Qatar, the world’s second-biggest LNG producer, has stopped its gas exports amid attacks during the conflict.

Since natural gas is a key feedstock in fertilizer, those disruptions only spell trouble for fertilizer production, both in the Middle East and beyond. QatarEnergy, for example, has had to halt its urea production after Iranian attacks throttled the company’s natural gas output, which was a necessary fertilizer input. As Qatar has pulled back, importing countries such as India and Pakistan have also been forced to roll back their own fertilizer production, and Bangladesh, too, has closed four of its five fertilizer factories.

The crunch harks back to 2022, when Russia’s weaponization of its energy supply and full-scale invasion of Ukraine—a major wheat exporter—sparked a global energy crisis and dramatically drove up fertilizer prices, fueling fears of growing food insecurity around the world.

Pellegrinelli, the Wood Mackenzie analyst, said the energy crisis of 2022 set off a “chain reaction” that saw “gas prices spiking, ammonia prices spiking, urea—and that all plays into the food production.”

As then, aid agencies are now sounding the alarm for how the widening war could drive up global food prices, particularly for import-dependent Gulf nations. Wheat prices neared a two-year high on Monday, adding even more to those concerns.

The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) warned over the weekend that the war was exacerbating economic and food pressures in Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza.

“The conflict is already having immediate food security impacts in the Middle East,” the WFP said in a statement. Any “disruption there risks reduced availability, lower crop yields, and hence higher global food prices.”