Tag Archives: fertilizer

Protests in Peru over High Fuel Prices and Fertilizer

Revelations 18:23:’For the merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.’

Important Takeaways:

  • Peruvian truckers, farmers block roads in protests over fuel, fertilizer
  • Peruvian farmers and truck drivers staged at least 14 roadblocks as part of ongoing protests over high gas prices and fertilizer shortages, hitting the trade and tourism sectors in the South American nation.
  • Farmers and truckers are feeling the impact of the war in Ukraine, which has pushed prices of fuel and fertilizer higher around the world. Peru also is struggling with its highest inflation rate since the end of the last century.
  • Government representatives did not immediately respond to inquiries about the protests.

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CF Industries informed customers of fertilizer shipment delays

Rev 6:6 NAS And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not damage the oil and the wine.”

Important Takeaways:

  • CF Industries: Union Pacific Curtails Fertilizer Shipments, Delaying Deliveries and Preventing New Rail Orders from Being Taken
  • CF Industries Holdings Inc., a leading global manufacturer of hydrogen and nitrogen products, today informed customers it serves by Union Pacific rail lines that railroad-mandated shipping reductions would result in nitrogen fertilizer shipment delays during the spring application season and that it would be unable to accept new rail sales involving Union Pacific for the foreseeable future. The Company understands that it is one of only 30 companies to face these restrictions.

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Coming soon: Fertilizer Shortage is going to affect Grocery Store Prices

Rev 6:6 NAS And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not damage the oil and the wine.”

Important Takeaways:

  • No One Is Talking About the Mass Food Shortage and Grocery Bill Increases US Is Barreling Toward
  • “We’re going to get hit on every front, on every expense possible,” Oklahoma farmer Ben Neal told Ingraham, “From fertilizers to fuel to labor, insurance – everything in between [including] our packing supplies.”
  • “These fertilizer prices haven’t really affected the grocery store prices yet. They will start coming this summer,” according to Neal.
  • Farmers are at the bottom of the food-supply pecking order, subject to commodity pricing outside of their control. And costs further along the supply chain for processing, packaging, transporting, distributing and general retailing may have their own inflation issues which bump prices beyond the 25-30 percent fertilizer cost increases Neal predicts for his farm.

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War in Ukraine Will Exasperate the Global Food Supply

Rev 6:6 NAS And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not damage the oil and the wine.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Ukraine war ‘catastrophic for global food’
  • “Things are changing by the hour”
  • “We were already in a difficult situation before the war… and now it’s additional disruption to the supply chains and we’re getting close to the most important part of this season for the Northern hemisphere, where a lot of fertilizer needs to move on and that will quite likely be impacted.”
  • Russia also produces enormous amounts of nutrients, like potash and phosphate – key ingredients in fertilizers, which enable plants and crops to grow.
  • “Half the world’s population gets food as a result of fertilizers… and if that’s removed from the field for some crops, [the yield] will drop by 50%,” Mr. Holsether said.
  • “For me, it’s not whether we are moving into a global food crisis – it’s how large the crisis will be.”

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Farmers and ranchers are concerned about skyrocketing fertilizer prices

Rev 6:6 NAS And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not damage the oil and the wine.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Food Costs Likely To Rise as Farmers’ Expenses Shoot Up
  • Bad policy and unpredictable nature are sending food prices through the roof.
  • “I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a very low crop in the next harvest,” Svein Tore Holsether, the CEO and president of fertilizer giant Yara International, warned in November. “I’m afraid we’re going to have a food crisis.”
  • “Among farmers and ranchers, very few topics are being discussed as much as the skyrocketing cost of fertilizer and increasing concerns regarding availability,” the American Farm Bureau reports.
  • Global food prices were already up by an average of 27.3 percent from a year earlier at the end of November, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s food price index.
  • A mix of increasing poverty and rising food prices is a dangerous cocktail for a troubled planet.

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Canadian shippers find few easy alternatives for grain, oil cut off by flood

By Rod Nickel

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) – Canadian exporters of commodities from grain to fertilizer and oil scrambled on Wednesday to divert shipments away from Port of Vancouver, which floods have isolated, but they found few easy alternatives.

The disaster, which has killed at least one person, has caused the latest blockage in the congested global supply chain, driving up inflation fears ahead of the holiday shopping season.

A month’s worth of rain in two days caused floods and mudslides in British Columbia that wrecked highways and two critical east-west rail lines owned by Canadian National Railway Co and Canadian Pacific Railway leading to Canada’s busiest port.

The Trans Mountain oil pipeline and part of an Enbridge Inc gas line have closed as precautions.

“That western corridor is our lifeblood,” said John Brooks, CP’s chief marketing officer, at an investor conference on Tuesday. “Just about all commodities to some extent flow through that.”

Vancouver’s port moves C$550 million ($437 million) worth of cargo a day, ranging from automobiles and consumer goods to commodities.

The alternatives include diverting commodities to British Columbia’s northern port of Prince Rupert, to the U.S. Pacific Northwest or across the continent to eastern Canada.

The clock is ticking. Port of Vancouver said it expects vessels to anchor longer while they await delayed cargo, a situation that usually results in shippers paying demurrage for the extra wait.

Buyers can also charge penalties for shipments that arrive late, raising the urgency to find alternatives.

“Everyone is looking at it,” one Canadian grain trader said.

Even if the railways can carry out repairs within a few days and restore service – they have not provided estimated timelines – delays will stretch for as much as one month given the backlog of shipments to work through, said a second grain industry source.

The Prince Rupert grain terminal, owned by Richardson International, Viterra and Cargill Inc, is already busy with exports, limiting its capacity to handle more volumes, said Wade Sobkowich, executive director of the Western Grain Elevator Association.

Canola futures for January delivery fell 1.5% as traders factored in transportation problems from the floods.

Teck Resources, a copper and coal miner, said in a statement that it was diverting trains from Vancouver to a Prince Rupert terminal.

Canpotex Ltd, the potash export company owned by Nutrien Ltd and Mosaic Co, will ship more of the crop nutrient through its smaller terminals in Portland, Oregon. and Saint John, New Brunswick, spokesperson Natashia Stinka said.

Trans Mountain’s closure means some 300,000 barrels of oil and refined products each day will start filling storage tanks, or find another conduit.

The main alternatives are shipping oil east on Enbridge’s Mainline or south by train to the United States, said John Zahary, CEO of Altex Energy, which owns rail terminals in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

“(It) does seem like supply chains are so tight these days that when something happens, panic and scrambling becomes the plan,” Zahary said.

(Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

U.S. farmers face supply shortages, higher costs after Hurricane Ida

By P.J. Huffstutter and Mark Weinraub

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Troy Walker’s phone will not stop ringing at his Kansas farm cooperative, with growers needing fertilizer for their wheat fields in the coming months.

In Kentucky, corn and soybean farmer Caleb Ragland said shelves at his local farm supplier are often bare of weed killer glyphosate and other crop chemicals. He expects the situation could get worse.

Bayer’s glyphosate manufacturing plant in Louisiana remains shut after Hurricane Ida slammed the Gulf Coast in late August, further complicating logistical and supply chain problems that had already tightened global supplies of fertilizers and chemicals.

“Ida was like a heavyweight boxer going 15 rounds, and threw a hard upper-cut at the farmer,” said Ragland, a ninth generation corn and soybean farmer in Magnolia, Kentucky. “Things were already bad. Ida made it worse.”

Ida disrupted grain and soybean shipments from the Gulf Coast, which accounts for about 60% of U.S. exports, at a time global crop supplies are tight and demand from China is strong.

Now, the storm’s ripple effects are hampering production and movement of some fertilizers and crop chemicals ahead of U.S. harvest. This is straining an agricultural and food supply chain already battered by trade and logistics delays during the pandemic.

Rising input costs threaten the incomes of farmers who had banked on booming profits this year, as crop prices soared to the highest in nearly a decade, after years of stagnating around break-even levels. Ragland and other farmers have been rethinking what they will plant in the spring; crops requiring less fertilizer look more attractive.

“At the current prices for nitrogen, it’s making me take a hard look at my corn acres,” Ragland said. “It makes me think we might grow soybeans on some of those acres.”

Before Hurricane Ida, the U.S. Agriculture Department had estimated that farmers would face a 2.2% increase in all corn input expenses for every acre planted in 2022, according to the most recent data, as chemicals and fertilizers followed higher crop prices and supply chain disruptions.

Global supplies were thin of the raw ingredients needed to make farm herbicides including glufosinate, atrazine and glyphosate, partly due to pandemic-related labor and shipping issues, said Marc-Andre Fortin, director of North American crop protection with Farmers Business Network, an online marketplace for farmers.

Imports of glyphosate containers shipped into the Port of New Orleans were down 71% from the same period a year earlier and herbicide container imports were down 1.2%, according to Panjiva, the supply chain research unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Potash imports into New Orleans dropped 14.8%.

Then, Ida hit and shuttered Bayer’s glyphosate plant in Luling, Louisiana. The plant helps provide all the active ingredient for Bayer’s Roundup branded ag herbicides in the United States, the company told Reuters.

Bayer’s plant has been closed since Aug. 28. The company, which hopes to restore power within weeks, said it is also working to repair wind damage and run system tests.

RATIONING SUPPLIES

Global glyphosate supplies were already tight as flooding, COVID-19 outbreaks and congested ports snarled production and exports in China for months, said Allan W. Gray, executive director of the Purdue University Center for Food and Agricultural Business.

As a result, chemical manufacturers are rationing supplies to farmers and others, Gray said.

Fertilizer is problematic, too. Walker and the staff at Kansas farm cooperative MKC have not been able to get price quotes from fertilizer suppliers for early 2022. Suppliers do not know if they will have anything to sell, he said – so Walker has turned away some customers.

Such problems have plagued retailers for months. China, the world’s top exporter of phosphate, temporarily halted urea and diammonium phosphate fertilizer exports this summer to feed domestic demand as energy costs and corn prices rose.

More recently, fertilizer producer CF Industries Holdings Inc halted operations at two United Kingdom manufacturing complexes, citing high costs for natural gas feedstock, a key raw material used in nitrogen fertilizers.

Canada’s largest potash producer Nutrien Ltd is sold out in North America through at least the third quarter, and global stocks for potash are tight for the rest of the year, said Ken Seitz, executive vice president of potash at Nutrien Ltd.

Ida tightened fertilizer supplies further, when CF Industries and Incitec Pivot Ltd shut plants because of the hurricane and declared force majeure for customers.

As the supply chain snarled, prices spiked. Prior to the storm, a New Orleans barge of urea set to ship in September to destinations across the U.S. or Canada traded at $450 a ton, said Josh Linville, director of fertilizer at StoneX Group Inc. After, the price jumped to $552 a ton.

“In the fertilizer world, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong,” Linville said. “It’s death by a thousand cuts.”

Wheat and cotton farmer Keeff Felty, 54, said the situation is spiraling. He is studying soil samples to see where he can cut back on fertilizer next season, and paid a company to haul some in-state after local suppliers could not fill his order.

“The price went up from Monday to Wednesday,” said Felty, “and by that night, they were out.”

(Additional reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba; Editing by Caroline Staufer and David Gregorio)