Mark Mueller is a fourth-generation Iowa farmer who has spent 30 years watching corn prices rise and fall, watching droughts come and go, watching neighbors sell off land they could no longer afford to work. He has never, he told NBC News, been more worried about the future of American farming than he is right now. "I am more concerned now than I have been in my 30 years of farming," Mueller said.
Mueller also serves as president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association. He is not a man given to dramatics. But the numbers he is watching in the spring of 2026 do not leave much room for optimism. The nitrogen fertilizer his operation depends on cost $795 per ton on February 22, 2026, a few days before the United States and Israel struck Iran. By the end of March, his supplier was charging $990 per ton. That is a jump of nearly $200 in about five weeks.
At the same time, diesel fuel — which powers almost every piece of heavy equipment on an American farm — averaged $5.51 per gallon nationwide by late March 2026, according to AAA. Before the conflict began, it was $3.76. That $1.75 increase may not sound dramatic at the gas pump, but for operations that burn thousands of gallons per season just to plant and harvest, it adds up fast.
A Crisis That Started Before the War
The agricultural stress building in the spring of 2026 did not start with the conflict in the Gulf. It has been accumulating for years.
In 2025, the number of Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies reached 315, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. That figure represented a 46 percent increase over the previous year. Chapter 12 is a specific bankruptcy provision designed for family farmers and fishermen, and its use at elevated levels is one of the clearest indicators of financial distress across the sector.
Before the Hormuz closure, the United States Department of Agriculture had already projected that total farm sector debt would reach a record $624.7 billion in 2026. That was the baseline. The war has pushed costs higher on top of a foundation that was already cracking.
"It's a return of a classic problem that we've long seen. Crop input costs are higher, while revenues have fallen," said Jonathan Coppess, associate professor of agriculture policy at the University of Illinois. "Farmers get squeezed between what they're receiving for the crop and what they pay to produce it."
Vanessa Garcia Polanco, government relations director at the National Young Farmers Coalition, described the accumulated toll directly: "All the stress that we have seen compounding from last year has really driven more farmers to bankruptcy, to take on more loans, or just actually stop farming altogether."
The Hormuz Connection: Fertilizer Routes Through the Gulf
To understand why a military conflict in the Persian Gulf is raising the price of corn in Iowa, it is necessary to understand how deeply American agriculture depends on Middle Eastern supply chains.
According to Chris Yearsley, CEO and head of nitrogen at Profercy, a global fertilizer pricing and analysis firm, approximately 35 percent of global urea trade passes through or originates in the Middle East region. Around 20 percent of global phosphate trade comes from Saudi Arabia. The United States imports roughly 25 percent of its total fertilizer use, including 18 percent of its nitrogen supply, according to the American Farm Bureau.
Qatar, specifically, operates one of the largest urea production facilities in the world. Time magazine reported that approximately 20 percent of the fertilizer used by American farmers is produced at a Qatari facility that cannot ship product while the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Qatar sits at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, its only maritime export route through the strait.
The price trajectory for nitrogen fertilizer tells the story clearly. Benchmark New Orleans nitrogen prices stood at $350 per short ton in late December 2025, according to Yearsley. By late February 2026, just before the conflict began, prices had risen to $470 per ton. As of March 10, nitrogen was trading at approximately $600 per ton. That is a roughly 70 percent increase in about ten weeks.
Fertilizer represents the largest single variable cost for most corn operations. For corn, the United States' biggest production crop by volume, fertilizer can account for as much as 20 percent of total production expenses, according to USDA data.
Spring Planting Under Duress
The timing is the particularly brutal part. American farmers are entering spring planting season right now. Decisions about how much fertilizer to buy, at what price, and whether to plant the full acreage are being made in real time, under conditions nobody planned for.
Mueller said he purchased most of the fertilizer he needs for spring planting before the conflict began, which gave him some protection. But he had to buy a portion at higher post-conflict prices, and he is deliberately holding off on purchasing the additional fertilizer he will need for summer, hoping prices fall. They have not fallen yet.
Lance Lillibridge, a corn and cattle farmer from Vinton, Iowa, told NBC News he has decided to use less fertilizer this year as a direct response to the price spike. "I'm probably going to see a reduction in yield," Lillibridge said. "If there's not the supply out there, then the price is going to go up."
Faith Parum, an economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, described the supply risk as something that could worsen over time. "Right now, our farmers can get the product — it's just really expensive," she said. "We're slowly starting to hear the longer this goes on, we're also going to have issues with even the availability of the fertilizer."
Parum framed the sector's position with numbers: "We're going on to year four of losses across the farm economy. It's going to become harder and harder for them to put a crop in the ground."
The Food Price Lag: What Consumers Will Feel Later
Higher farm costs do not appear at the grocery store immediately. Spring crops are being planted now and will not be harvested for months. But the mechanism is already in motion, and economists say consumers will see the effects before harvest arrives.
Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, explained the breadth of what is affected: "Anything that is grown and that requires fertilizers, which is most of everything that we consume, is potentially affected by this rise in fertilizer prices. And as a result, we may see these prices rise rapidly across grocery stores in the U.S."
The cattle sector illustrates a compounding problem. When corn prices rise, the cost of feeding cattle rises with them. Cattle farmers are simultaneously dealing with higher diesel prices for their own operations. Beef prices were already at record highs heading into 2026, driven in part by shrinking cattle herds and drought conditions across major grazing states. Any further input cost increases arrive on top of a market that was already strained.
Will Harris, a fourth-generation cattle farmer in Bluffton, Georgia, told NBC News he does not know where consumers' breaking point is. "I worry about how much more consumers will continue to pay for beef," Harris said. "I think that I can produce it as cheap as anybody else, but I don't know where consumers draw their lines."
Higher transport costs from elevated diesel prices are a more immediate transmission mechanism. Distribution centers, trucking networks, and last-mile grocery delivery all run on diesel. Lance Lillibridge described the dynamic plainly: "If you're feeling these costs now, it's only going to continue to increase as the supply chain fills with higher-cost goods."
Lillibridge also underscored the downstream reach of corn in particular: "Corn is used in over 4,000 products. It's not just food — it's industrial products, like your paper that you would put in your printer has cornstarch in it, plastics, just tons of things have industrial uses from corn."
Federal Help: Too Little, Too Late?
The federal government has provided financial support to the agricultural sector in recent years, but farmers in the field are skeptical it is sufficient for what they are now facing.
In December 2025, the Trump administration announced a $12 billion aid package for farmers. At a White House event for farmers in March 2026, President Trump pledged to push for more aid, urged Congress to pass a new farm bill, and said he would ask Congress to permit year-round sales of E15, an ethanol-blended fuel that the American Farm Bureau says could reduce pump costs for consumers and create additional markets for American-grown crops.
Mueller attended the White House event. His assessment was pointed: "I guess I would liken it to empty calories. It was like a pep rally with very little being said."
The 2026 Farm Bill passed the House Agriculture Committee with bipartisan support earlier in the year and still needs Senate action. Policy analysts have noted that the bill, even if passed quickly, is designed to address structural support for the sector, not an acute cost shock of the kind now underway.
Gregg Ibendahl, associate professor at Kansas State University, noted that federal payments in 2025 were critical to keeping many farms technically solvent: "They turned a really bad year into at least a mediocre year." The implication is that without comparable or larger intervention in 2026, a mediocre year could tip into a genuinely damaging one.
Trump's tariffs have added a further layer of complexity that farmers themselves raise when describing their situation. Mueller was blunt: "Our government made our life more difficult by walking away from trade deals or instituting tariffs or just basically making our customers angry — our customers being other nations and companies in other nations."
The Long View: Fewer Farmers, Higher Prices
The concern among agricultural economists and farmers themselves is not just about 2026. It is about what happens to the structure of American farming if conditions stay difficult long enough to force a new round of exits from the industry.
Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, described the current moment as qualitatively different from typical agricultural cycles: "Farming is an inherently risky business. But I think what we've seen over the past 12-plus months is something different."
Rodney Bushmeyer, who runs a multigenerational family farm in Illinois that dates back more than 100 years, told The Guardian that the accumulated pressure has pushed his operation to a point that is simply not sustainable over time. "There is really no profit right now," Bushmeyer said. "It's not sustainable in the long term. We can do that for a few years, but eventually it'll put us out of business."
Mueller, the Iowa Corn Growers Association president, described what he expects the end state to look like if the financial pressure does not ease: "I really do see fewer farmers when it's all done. In the end, the consumer will still have fewer choices, probably have a little higher prices, and farmers will have less margin than they did before."
Farm bankruptcies rose 46 percent in 2025. Nitrogen fertilizer is up 70 percent since December. Diesel is up nearly 50 percent since February. And the spring planting season — the single most consequential window in the agricultural calendar — is happening right now. Whether this becomes the farm crisis that agricultural economists have been warning about for years depends almost entirely on how long the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.