Seven in ten American farmers cannot afford the fertilizer they need to plant this year. The Farm Bureau’s own data tells the story — but the deeper story is about a president whose tariffs, war, and silence have turned the heartland into collateral damage, and the constitutional questions Washington can no longer avoid.
Seventy percent. That is the figure the American Farm Bureau Federation — an organization no one would mistake for a left-wing pressure group — published last month after surveying more than 5,700 farmers across all fifty states and Puerto Rico. Seven in ten respondents say fertilizer has become so expensive that they will not be able to buy what their fields require for the 2026 growing season. In the South, the number climbs to seventy-eight percent. In the Northeast, sixty-nine. In the West, sixty-six. Even in the Midwest, the country’s bread-and-corn basket, nearly half cannot afford what their land needs. The findings come from the Farm Bureau’s own April release, and they describe an agricultural economy not merely struggling but seizing up.
This is not weather. It is not the inevitable cycle of commodity markets. It is the predictable consequence of decisions made in the Oval Office — tariffs imposed and re-imposed, a war launched without congressional authorization, an administration that has met the worst farm crisis in a generation with press releases and photo ops. And it is happening to a constituency that, by one count, delivered 77.7 percent of farm-dependent counties to Donald Trump in 2024. The political math is brutal. The moral math is worse.
1. A Survey That Reads Like an Indictment
The Farm Bureau conducted its survey between April 3 and April 11. The results, analyzed in the organization’s Market Intel brief by economist Faith Parum, are not subtle. More than eighty percent of rice, cotton, and peanut producers say they cannot purchase the fertilizer they need. Ninety-four percent of all respondents report that their financial situation has either worsened or remained the same as the punishing year before. Farm diesel prices have jumped forty-six percent since the end of February. Urea prices have climbed forty-seven percent in the same window.
Parum’s analysis is methodical and quietly devastating. “When producers cannot afford full fertilizer application rates,” she writes, “they may reduce nutrient use or shift acreage decisions, both of which increase the risk of lower yields and reduced production potential in the 2026 crop year.” Translation: less fertilizer means less food. Less food means higher prices at the checkout line. And the farmers absorbing the loss in between are the ones who can least afford to absorb it.
Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall, briefing reporters last month, described the moment as “generational headwinds” for American agriculture. The phrase is generous. What the survey actually describes is a structural collapse already underway. Chapter 12 family farm bankruptcies surged forty-six percent in 2025, reaching 315 filings — the highest level since the pandemic, and the third consecutive annual increase. Total farm debt is projected to hit a record $624.7 billion this year, with operating loans growing larger and stretching longer — the financial equivalent of breathing through a smaller and smaller straw.
2. A Crisis the President Built
Defenders of the administration will reach for the war in Iran as the explanation. They are correct that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly thirty percent of the world’s fertilizer and twenty percent of its oil previously moved, has tightened global supply at the worst conceivable moment. They are not correct that this absolves the president — because the president started the war. He launched the assault on Iran without a congressional declaration in February, and the strait has been effectively impassable ever since.
But the fertilizer crisis predates the war. President Trump’s tariffs — the across-the-board duties he reimposed in late February under Section 122 of the Trade Act after the Supreme Court struck down his earlier ones — pulled fertilizer into a trade war with Canada and other suppliers months before the missiles flew. Countervailing duties on Moroccan phosphate fertilizer, which the administration has been promising to review for over a year, have cost U.S. farmers an estimated $6.9 billion between 2021 and 2025, according to a Texas A&M study. Morocco once supplied more than half of America’s phosphate imports. By 2025, its share had fallen below one percent.
None of this happened by accident. Trump’s own Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer, personally lobbied for the very tariffs now strangling American farmers when he represented the J.R. Simplot Company before joining the administration. Two firms — Simplot and Mosaic — control roughly ninety percent of the domestic fertilizer market and spent years securing the duties that have priced foreign competition out. The crisis the White House is now performing concern about is a crisis his own officials helped engineer.
“I’m not hearing from anyone here that the White House has a plan that will solve this crisis for farmers. Dialog is one thing; a plan is another.”
— Sen. Reverend Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Senate Agriculture Committee, May 12, 2026
3. The Numbers Beneath the Headline
The seventy-percent figure is the headline, but the architecture beneath it is what should worry every American. The Farm Bureau survey, paired with Federal Reserve and USDA data, sketches an economy crumbling at its foundation.
4. How We Got Here — A Timeline of Choices
Crises invented by policy rarely arrive in a single moment. They are built one decision at a time. The current fertilizer collapse has a clear chronology, and every step on it was a choice.
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5. What It Costs the Kitchen Table
A reader who does not farm and does not plan to may be tempted to read this as a story about somebody else’s pain. It is not. The Farm Bureau’s economist is explicit: when farmers cannot apply full fertilizer rates, yields fall. When yields fall, retail prices rise. The USDA’s most recent forecast already projects food prices climbing 3.6 percent in 2026, up from the 3.1 percent it predicted in January. That projection was issued before the worst of the fertilizer shock and before forecasters fully integrated a continental drought that, by mid-spring, covered 61 percent of the lower 48.
Some categories are already moving. Year-over-year, tomato prices were up 102 percent in March. Vegetables, ninety. The Kobeissi Letter notes most of the increase so far has been driven by fuel; the full pass-through of fertilizer costs has not yet reached shelves. When it does, it will arrive in ground beef, in bread, in the bag of rice that costs less than five dollars at the supermarket because somewhere a producer used adequate fertilizer to grow it. That arithmetic now runs the other way.
Rep. Shri Thanedar of Michigan put it more plainly than most lawmakers will: “food prices are skyrocketing because 70% of farmers can’t afford fertilizer, due to Trump’s reckless Iran War.” Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota added that “the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has made energy prices go up globally, and it’s increased the cost of living.” Ranking Senate Agriculture Committee member Sen. Amy Klobuchar, also of Minnesota, noted at this week’s hearing the “direct link” between the soaring components of nitrogen fertilizer and the president’s own decisions.
For the average household, this is not abstract. It is the school lunch that costs more. The grocery run that fits less in the bag. The retired farmer in Como, Mississippi who told NPR his patience with this president — for whom he voted — is “wearing thin.”
“We are paying input prices of 2026, but getting crop prices of the ’70s and ’80s.”
— Tommy Salisbury, Oklahoma farmer, to the American Farm Bureau Federation
6. A Failure of Leadership — and What the Constitution Allows
The diagnosis of leadership failure does not require partisan glasses to read. The Heritage Foundation — not a left-wing outlet — has called on the administration to “pull out all the stops” on fertilizer access. Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, has introduced legislation to scrap the very phosphate tariffs his own party’s administration has refused to lift. The House passed a farm bill last month that contained no provisions to reverse the price spikes. The Senate has scheduled hearings. The administration has scheduled events. The farms are still failing.
This is the shape of leadership in crisis: a president who launched a war that cratered global supply chains, who reimposed tariffs his own Supreme Court told him to drop, whose Trade Representative personally lobbied for the duties now bankrupting the constituency that elected him, and who, when asked directly about the costs, deflected to the suffering of Iran. It is the shape of a man who cannot or will not perform the basic function of his office: to govern in the interest of the country.
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment Was Built for Moments Like This
Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, provides for the temporary or permanent removal of a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” It can be invoked by the Vice President together with a majority of the Cabinet, or — and this is the language that matters now — by “such other body as Congress may by law provide.” Congress has never set up that body. House Judiciary Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) is now trying to.
On April 14, 2026, Raskin introduced legislation backed by 50 co-sponsors to create a 17-member independent commission of physicians, psychiatrists, and former senior officials, evenly appointed by both parties, empowered to conduct a medical examination of the sitting president on the request of Congress. Days earlier, he had demanded the White House physician perform a cognitive evaluation in light of the president’s “increasingly volatile, incoherent, and alarming public statements” on Iran. He has been joined by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who called publicly for invocation of the Amendment, and Rep. Eric Swalwell of California.
The constitutional argument has two parts. The first is the policy record: a president who initiated a war that severed America’s fertilizer supply at planting season; who maintains tariffs that have cost his own voters billions; who has presented no plan to address the consequences and whose own Agriculture Secretary calls the situation an “overarching economic pending disaster.” The second is the conduct record: rambling public statements, threats to use American cities as military “training grounds,” and a pattern of behavior that congressional Democrats and a growing number of governors describe as functional incapacity to discharge the duties of the office.
The Practical Barriers — Honestly
The 25th Amendment, as written, was never designed for a president whose own party controls Congress and refuses to act. Section 4 requires the Vice President to lead the invocation, and Vice President J.D. Vance will not. Raskin’s commission bill must pass a Republican House and Senate, and almost certainly cannot. The president could veto it. The route is, in conventional terms, closed.
Why That Does Not End the Argument
It does not end the argument because constitutional remedies are not invoked because they will succeed; they are invoked because they articulate what a republic owes itself when leadership fails the country it serves. Raskin’s bill puts on the record — for this Congress and every one that follows — that the legislative branch has a constitutional role under Section 4 it has never fulfilled. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment exists not as a magic wand but as a moral and legal standard, a question the public is entitled to ask of any presidency: is this man capable of doing the job? On the evidence of the fertilizer crisis alone — a war that severed supply, a tariff regime that priced farmers out, a White House response that consists of finger-pointing at Tehran — the answer is no. The path may be blocked, but the case is on the record. And the record matters.
7. What Is Actually Required
Short of constitutional intervention, the policy fixes are not mysterious. They are the ones farm groups, economists, and a small but growing number of Republican senators have been begging for: the immediate suspension of countervailing duties on Moroccan and Russian phosphate fertilizer, a serious diplomatic effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz that does not depend on continued escalation, an emergency aid package larger than the one already overtaken by events, and the rollback of the tariffs the Supreme Court already told the president to abandon. The Democratic National Committee, in a statement last week, said the administration has proposed “no initiatives to immediately bring down the cost of fertilizer” in the nearly seventy days since the war began. That is not a partisan exaggeration. It is the testimony of the Farm Bureau’s own membership.
The farmers most punished by this presidency are, in disproportionate numbers, the ones who delivered it. That is a tragedy of democratic faith. It is not a reason to look away from the consequences. It is a reason to name them clearly, and to demand a government willing to undo what it has done.
Editorial Conclusion
A nation that cannot fertilize its own fields is a nation whose leadership has failed in the most elemental sense. Seven in ten American farmers cannot afford to plant a full crop because of decisions made in the Oval Office — a war launched without authorization, tariffs imposed against expert warning, an administration with no plan and no apparent capacity to make one. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment exists for moments when the country requires more than the man in the office can provide. Whether or not Congress invokes it, the constitutional question now belongs on the public record. The fields will not wait. Neither should the republic.
Sources & References
- AFBF — Nationwide Survey: Most Farmers Can’t Afford Fertilizer
- AFBF Market Intel — Real Impact of Fertilizer Availability and Price (Faith Parum)
- AFBF — Farm Bankruptcies Continued to Climb in 2025
- Roll Call — Higher Fertilizer Prices Pressure Trump-Loyal US Farmers (May 11, 2026)
- NPR — Rising Fertilizer and Fuel Prices Push Farmers to the Brink (April 25, 2026)
- Fortune — Tariffs, War, and Drought: A ‘Perfect Storm’ for U.S. Farmers
- The Hill — Majority of America’s Farmers Say They Can’t Afford Fertilizer
- Common Dreams — ‘War Profiteering’: Fertilizer Giants Boom as Trump Militarism Hurts Farmers
- Salon — Trump’s $12B Farm Aid Was Meant as Relief. The Iran War Is Wiping It Out
- Sen. Warnock — Fertilizer Experts: Trump Administration Has No Plan to Lower Prices
- House Judiciary Dems — Raskin Introduces 25th Amendment Commission Legislation
- House Judiciary Dems — Raskin Demands White House Physician Evaluate Trump’s Cognitive Fitness
- Axios — Raskin Demands Trump Cognitive Test in 25th Amendment Push
- Reason — Trump’s Trade Official Lobbied for the Fertilizer Tariffs Now Hurting Farmers
- Civil Eats — Trump Issues New Tariffs That Will Impact Farmers
- Farm Aid — Tracking the Farm Economy in Crisis
- Farm Policy News — U.S. Farm Bankruptcies Increased 46% in 2025
- CNBC — Iran War Fertilizer Shortage Threatens Republicans in Farm States
- DNC — Under Trump and Rollins, Fertilizer Costs Continue to Skyrocket
- Responsible Statecraft — Trump Risks War Backlash from American Farmers
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