Todd Littleton is a third-generation farmer in Gibson County, Tennessee. This spring, his fertilizer bill jumped $100,000. That's a 40% spike from last year. "The problem is, we're so strained financially coming into this issue," he told Fortune.

Littleton didn't start a war with Iran. He didn't close the Strait of Hormuz. He grows crops in West Tennessee. But the costs of a conflict 7,000 miles away landed on his doorstep in March, and they aren't going away when the shooting stops.

President Trump is right to confront a genocidal regime that sought nuclear weapons and held the world's most important shipping lane hostage. Removing that threat is worth doing. Tuesday night, Trump suspended the attack for two weeks, conditioned on Iran opening the Strait of Hormuz. But whether this conflict ends tomorrow or restarts in fourteen days, the economic damage to American agriculture is already locked in. And the vulnerability it exposed won't disappear with a ceasefire. The next chokepoint crisis could involve China, Russia, or someone we haven't planned for yet. The good news is that we already have the tools to make sure this never happens again.

One chokepoint, one-quarter of the world's fertilizer

The Strait of Hormuz is famous for oil. It should be famous for fertilizer. Forty-three percent of globally traded urea, 27% of ammonia, and half of the world's sulfur exports pass through that chokepoint. The strait has been effectively closed since U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began February 28.

The price response was immediate. Urea at the port of New Orleans jumped from $475 per metric ton to $680 by mid-March. That kind of move, that fast, shows how thin the global fertilizer market was before a single missile flew.

The United States imports 17% of its urea and 20% of its phosphate fertilizer from Persian Gulf sources. We're not the most exposed country, but "not the worst off" isn't a strategy. During spring planting, "exposed enough" is plenty.

The grocery bill's hidden tax

Fertilizer isn't a line item most Americans think about. They should. It represents 33% to 45% of operating costs for corn and wheat farmers. Half of all nitrogen fertilizer gets applied in spring. The timing of this crisis could not be worse.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says 80% of farmers locked in fertilizer prices last fall. That's good planning and good policy from the administration to encourage it. But the other 20% didn't lock in, and they're absorbing the full spike. Littleton is one of them.

The administration moved quickly with $12 billion in one-time farmer payments. That's a start, but the math is tight: it works out to about $44 per acre for corn, and production costs run around $900 per acre. For farmers in Littleton's position, the gap between what they got and what they need is still enormous. The question isn't whether Washington cares. It's whether the next round of solutions can match the scale of the problem.

The underlying picture was already fragile before the war started. Net farm income peaked at $182 billion in 2022 and fell to about $140 billion by 2024. That's a 23% drop in two years. The 2025 numbers looked better on paper, but only because the government contributed $30.5 billion in emergency payments. Strip those out and farm economics were already under pressure before a single bomb fell on Iran. As I wrote last month, the war didn't create these problems. It exposed the ones that were already there.

The projections suggest this reaches kitchen tables by late summer. The USDA forecasts food prices up 3.6% in 2026, with beef climbing 10.1% and sugar up 9.8%. Those numbers were published before the worst of the Hormuz disruption. Most people miss the lag between what farmers pay for fertilizer in spring and what families pay at the grocery store months later. The war started five weeks ago. The checkout-line impact likely arrives by August.

The skunk at the party

Littleton's problem is one farm in one county. But the economic forces behind it are national. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, released his annual shareholder letter Monday. He called rising inflation "the skunk at the party" and warned of a "toxic economic cocktail" that combines recession with persistent inflation. The economic term for that is stagflation. It's the word nobody wanted to hear again.

Dimon described the geopolitical risks as "like tectonic plates, always moving and periodically causing earthquakes." The Hormuz disruption is one of those earthquakes. The question is whether we have enough economic cushion left to absorb it.

Richard Roberts explained why in RealClearMarkets the same day. The American economy survived six years of shocks not because it was strong, but because it had four temporary cushions. The government spent $5 trillion in pandemic relief. American households built up $2.1 trillion in excess savings. AI investment poured money into data centers and infrastructure. And the Federal Reserve had room to cut interest rates when things got bad.

All four are gone. The pandemic money is spent. The savings were fully depleted by March 2024, according to the San Francisco Fed. AI investment momentum is slowing. And the Fed can't cut rates because energy-driven inflation is still running above target. That doesn't mean a recession is inevitable. It means we can't afford to wait on the solutions that are already within reach.

We solved the oil crisis. We can solve this one.

The United States has the resources to fix this problem. We just haven't bothered to use them.

Look at who controls what America needs to grow food. China produces over 30% of the world's nitrogen fertilizer and has been restricting exports since 2021. Morocco sits on 70% of the world's phosphate reserves. Russia, Belarus, and Canada together control 77% of potash exports. A third of the fertilizer used in the United States is imported. We have the same kind of vulnerability for food that we used to have for energy.

But we fixed the energy problem. Remember what happened with natural gas. The shale revolution took prices down 58% between 2008 and 2012. America went from importing energy to exporting it in 15 years. The same logic applies to fertilizer.

American ammonia plants are running at about 80% capacity. That means 20% sits idle. That's about 2.8 million metric tons of fertilizer supply that could be activated without building a single new facility. More than half of our ammonia production sits in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma, right next to cheap natural gas from the shale fields. The raw materials are there. The plants are there. We just need to turn them on.

The government already has the authority to make this happen. President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act for phosphorus on February 18, declaring it critical to national defense. The next step is extending that authority to ammonia and urea, the fertilizers farmers actually spread on their fields.

The funding is already authorized too. The USDA's Fertilizer Production Expansion Program has $900 million in authorized funding, and hundreds of millions remain unspent. The private sector isn't waiting. CF Industries is already building a $4 billion ammonia plant in Louisiana that will produce 1.4 million metric tons per year. The companies are ready. Policy needs to catch up.

America became the world's energy arsenal by producing its own. There is no reason we can't do the same thing for fertilizer.

A serious country does both

The administration has moved faster than most people realize. Rollins is working directly with input companies to hold prices down. The Venezuela fertilizer import channel is moving. The 80% lock-in rate shows that the push to get farmers hedged last fall worked. The DPA precedent on phosphorus shows this White House understands the national security frame for agricultural inputs. These are real steps.

The next step is to go bigger. Activate the idle ammonia capacity. Extend the Defense Production Act authority to cover the fertilizers farmers actually use. Deploy the Fertilizer Production Expansion Program funding that's already sitting in the account. Wars have costs. They always do. But a country that can remove a genocidal regime and retool its supply chains at the same time is a country that wins on both fronts.

Dimon called inflation the skunk at the party. For Todd Littleton in Gibson County, the skunk has already arrived, and it came with a six-figure bill. The war with Iran is the right call. The fertilizer crisis it created is a solvable problem. And solving it doesn't just help farmers survive this war. It makes us stronger for the next one. A serious country doesn't choose between fighting the conflict and fixing the fallout. It does both.