Fertilizer challenges

Producers and others in the ag sector have expressed concerns about having enough fertilizer in a timely manner to apply as planting or soon to be planting of spring crops gets underway. Corey Rosenbusch of the Fertilizer Institute says despite a multitude of supply chain disruptions, including issues with rail shipments of inputs. Speaker 2: Most of our fertilizer producers were lucky enough to be able to explain the importance of spring planting season and that small window of needing to get nutrients to the farmers. Speaker 1: Limiting the amount of disruption and assuring availability of fertilizer to most farmers this spring. Yet, Rosenbusch says the Transport challenge is the latest in a series of disruptions to fertilizer producers. Speaker 2: Delayed plant maintenance. We saw the winter storms production capacity pretty hard. Natural gas is the primary feedstock, making up about 85% of the cost of producing nitrogen fertilizer. And when those natural gas plants went down, it also affected fertilizer production, Rosenbusch says. Speaker 1: All this underscores both the need to build a greater resiliency in the fertilizer industry and to emphasize increased domestic production. Speaker 2: We're never going to be able to meet all of our needs because we don't have all of those resources here. So imports will be part of the equation. But at the same time, we need to make sure we're investing as much as possible as we can in our domestic production.