The fuel and fertilizer spikes squeezing U.S. agriculture are not a regional story, but are hitting farm balance sheets from the Mid-South to the Midwest. Dr. Michael Deliberto, an agricultural economist from the AgCenter at Louisiana State University, said the squeeze isn’t just a regional problem.
“This isn’t a Louisiana thing or a Mid-South thing. This issue is very real, and it’s resonating across farm country right now. In Louisiana, we were lucky, I guess, because last year we had some really good crop conditions here. We had record yields for cotton in our state. The rice crop did fairly well, too, but now that we enter 2026, the agricultural lending environment was tight. I think the consensus was, okay, inputs are going to be up, we’re optimistic about market conditions, we’ve got an improved safety net with the One Big Beautiful Bill from the policy front, and I think everybody knew 2026 was going to be a challenge.”
Global geopolitics are only making it worse.
“The geopolitical mess, or debacle, however you want to say it, into this discussion, now is a time where, even though we’re seeing rewards in the market, right, you know, we got our first glimpse at early new-crop pricing, you know, even though the run up and futures have been great, we still got a long way to go to get some of these costs absorbed, especially for us here in the Mid-South.”
He said, like other producers around the country, Southern corn farmers are especially feeling the squeeze.
“There’s a lot of concern right now in our corn sector here in the Mid-South. Here in Louisiana, we had to replant about half of the corn acres that went in the ground. We had to replant about 200,000 acres of corn in our state. We plant corn early here in Louisiana, and the fertilizer price squeeze is very real for our corn producers in Northern Louisiana. Typically, as a farmer in the Mid-South, we’re going to rotate corn predominantly with soybeans. Our cotton acres have gone down over time, so predominantly our growers are corn-soybean rotations, a little bit of cotton, maybe a little bit of furrow-irrigated rice, in our northeastern portion of our state, which we call the Delta, due to its proximity to the Mississippi River.”
Deliberto said the price of nitrogen jumped significantly in the South in just a few months.
“When you look at the fertilizer recommendations that our agronomists put forward at LSU every year, depending upon the soil texture, we’re anywhere between 200-250 pounds of N, and when you translate that to where we were in early January versus where we are here at the end of April, anywhere from a $66 to $83 increase just in the cost of nitrogen. You know, it’s not just the fertilizer price increases, but it’s the diesel fuel price spikes that we’re seeing now from the Strait of Hormuz being closed in the Middle East conflict right now,”