Spring Fertilizer Shortage

 CHS Inc.is a producer-to-consumer agricultural foods system owned by farmers, ranchers and their local co-ops from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Northwest and from the Canadian border to Texas. CHS is a fully integrated agricultural foods cooperative providing a wide variety of products and services ranging from grain marketing to food processing to meet the needs of customers around the world. It also operates petroleum refineries/pipelines and, through a broad range of working partnerships, markets and distributes Cenex ® brand energy products, along with agronomic inputs and feed to rural America.

 Now why am I bringing that up? Because CHS Executive Vice President Mark Palmquist says that while some fertilizer went down this fall - logistical problems may surface this spring. In other words suppliers aren’t sure how much to stock and producers aren’t sure how much or when to buy: “There’s great hesitancy about the whole distribution system as well as retailers considering the volatility they just went through to really load up and pull up the inventory. A little bit of concern in pockets of having enough physical product on hand to meet the needs.”

This is a situation where I don’t know what the last line or the bottom line is…buy…don’t buy…but one thing’s for sure, producers need to be aware.