(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Farmers all over America are on edge right now, and I certainly can’t blame them. The war in the Middle East has created a fertilizer crisis at the worst time possible. As you will see below, if nitrogen fertilizer is not applied to wheat, corn and rice at the proper time, there is no hope of recovery later. Since it does not appear that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened any time soon, there will be serious crop losses in the United States, and in poorer countries throughout the world it will be even worse.
Meanwhile, most of the country is experiencing at least some level of drought right now. If you check out the latest map from the U.S. Drought Monitor, it looks like a horror show. Even if there was no war going on in the Middle East, farmers in the U.S. would still be facing a nightmarish drought that never seems to end.
In Colorado, one family that had planned to go skiing during spring break decided to go to the beach instead because of the extremely dry conditions…
Stretching out in their beach chairs as the temperature climbed toward 70 degrees, Seth and Renee McLaughlin watched their three kids play in the sand on what was supposed to be a family ski trip.
Booked last November, their spring break vacation to Colorado’s mountains required a hard shift in plans following a historically warm and dry winter: Instead of zipping down the slopes, the couple watched their kids sift sand into colorful toy buckets on the shores of Lake Dillon.
“It’s obviously frustrating. You want to go skiing, and usually we ski until May, and instead we’re at the beach,” said Seth McLaughlin, 44, a nonprofit consultant. “I feel bad for the folks who spent tens of thousands of dollars to come on vacation here.”
There has been so little snow in most of the western half of the nation this winter.
Snowpack levels are historically low, and that means that a very rough summer is ahead.
We are only in March, and we are already seeing severe water restrictions being imposed.
For example, restaurants in Denver are forbidden from serving water unless customers specifically ask for it…
Restaurants in Colorado’s capital are only allowed to serve water to guests if they ask, according to new restrictions by the Denver Board of Water Commissioners.
“Restaurants and catering businesses shall serve water only upon request,” the mandatory irrigation restrictions read.
The rules were issued in the Mile High City after the commissioners declared a Stage 1 Drought and made plans to seek a 20 percent reduction in water use. City officials expect drought conditions to last until April 30, 2027.
That is crazy.
And hotels in Denver are being ordered to “not change sheets more often than every four days for guests staying more than one night”…
“Lodging establishments shall not change sheets more often than every four days for guests staying more than one night, except for health or safety reasons or upon express request of guests,” the Denver Board of Water Commissioners stated.
Drivers who attempt to wash their car are told to use a bucket or a hand-held hose equipped with an automatic shut-off nozzle if they don’t use a commercial car wash.
Residents can water their grass only two days per week, according to the schedule provided by city officials, but it is prohibited between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., when the sun is up.
If things are this bad now, what will they look like once we get to the dog days of August?
USA Today talked to a water expert named Brad Udall, and he had a difficult time finding the words to describe how severe this crisis has become…
Longtime Western water expert Brad Udall said it’s hard to put into words just how bad things are. He said the early ski area closures will likely be followed by ranchers selling off cattle, and then skies darkened by wildfire smoke as dry vegetation burns.
Farmers in many areas of the Southwest simply are not going to have enough water this year.
So what are they going to do?
At the same time, U.S. farmers are also facing a fertilizer crisis that is unlike anything they have ever experienced before.
One industry insider is projecting that here in the United States there will be a shortage of at least 2 million tons of urea this spring…
“If you had sat us down before and said, ‘Hey, I want you to think of the nightmare scenario for fertilizer. What would it be?’ It would be this exact event during this exact time of year,” said Josh Linville, who oversees the global fertilizer department at the brokerage firm StoneX.
Linville says urea that had been expected to arrive in the United States next month, in the peak of planting season, won’t come.
The Fertilizer Institute predicts that U.S. farmers will be short some 2 million tons of urea this spring.
Of course it isn’t just U.S. farmers that will be dealing with a lack of fertilizer.
As John Rubino has correctly pointed out, much of the world’s fertilizer supply is now trapped behind three locks…
- Lock one: the Strait of Hormuz. The IRGC permissioned corridor allows oil tankers from friendly nations to pay $2 million in yuan and pass. It does not allow fertiliser vessels to pass at any price. Zero approved fertiliser transits in 24 days. The Gulf supplies 49 percent of the world’s exported urea and roughly 30 percent of traded ammonia. That supply is not delayed. It is denied. The gate opens for molecules that fund the gatekeeper. It stays closed for molecules that feed the planet.
- Lock two: Russia. The world’s largest exporter of ammonium nitrate just halted all AN exports until after April 21. Three to four million tonnes per year, gone from global markets at the exact moment the Northern Hemisphere needs it most. The official reason is “domestic priority.” The strategic effect is leverage. Russia earns windfall revenue from the oil price spike its ally’s war created, then removes the fertiliser that farmers need to plant through the crisis. The disease and the cure, again, from the same address.
- Lock three: China. Beijing has banned exports of nitrogen-potassium blends and phosphate fertilisers through August 2026. China is the world’s largest phosphate producer and a major nitrogen supplier. The ban removes the last alternative source that could have compensated for Hormuz and Russia. Three locks. Three countries. Three deliberate decisions timed to the same biological calendar.
None of this is going to change in time to save the spring planting season.
That means that there will be widespread crop losses, and global food supplies will start getting really tight about six months from now.
It will not matter if the Strait of Hormuz opens up in a couple of months. As Rubino has explained, nitrogen fertilizer must be applied at the correct time or it won’t work…
The biological calendar does not negotiate. Corn requires nitrogen at the V6 to VT growth stage or kernel set is permanently reduced. Wheat requires it at tillering and jointing or grain fill collapses. Rice requires it at transplanting or yield drops 20 to 40 percent in low-input systems. These are not economic models. They are cellular processes. The plant either receives nitrogen during the window or it does not. If it does not, no subsequent application, no price increase, no policy reversal can recover what was lost. The damage is written into the biology of the seed.
We desperately need the Strait of Hormuz to be reopened as soon as possible.
If this does not happen, a lot of people in impoverished nations will soon become extremely hungry.
Unfortunately, the Iranians have an extremely tight grip on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and they do not intend for that to change…
After a month of fighting, Iran arguably has secured the most significant strategic victory via its tightening grip over traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Bloomberg reported Monday.
The first full month of the war saw roughly six vessels per day on average traversing the critical waterway in either direction, compared with ~135/day in normal times, according to ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg, adding that 80% of the small number of oil tankers exiting the strait have belonged to Iran or countries with which it is on cordial terms.
Either the Trump administration will have to give the Iranians everything that they want, or the Trump administration will have to take control of the Strait of Hormuz by force.
As many have pointed out in recent weeks, taking control of the Strait of Hormuz by force would be an exceedingly difficult thing to do…
Dangers such as cruise and ballistic missiles, fast-attack boats and sophisticated naval mines await any vessel attempting to traverse the vital passage.
With transit lanes in some places only three to four miles from the Iranian shoreline, ships have less than two minutes to react to incoming strikes.
Naval escorts also face the threat of Tehran using remote-controlled boats laden with explosives to strike them.
The oil passage is narrow and shallow, forcing vessels within miles of Iran’s mountainous shores, a landscape that lends itself to asymmetric warfare tactics, in which Tehran deploys weapons that are small, widely dispersed and hard for adversaries to eliminate entirely.
It could take months to resolve this crisis.
Meanwhile, the global energy crisis will just keep getting worse with each passing day.
At this moment, tankers that left the Persian Gulf before the war began are still arriving at their destinations.
But as maritime expert Lars Jensen has pointed out, soon there will be no more tankers loaded with oil arriving, and that is when the real shortages will begin…
‘It would appear we are only at the beginning of those price escalations. We need to keep in mind that a lot of the oil that was loaded in the Persian Gulf prior to this crisis is still right now arriving in some of the refineries around the world. That will soon stop. The oil shortages we are seeing are only going to get worse. Even if magically the Strait of Hormuz would reopen tomorrow’
For some parts of the world, tankers will stop arriving in early April, and for other parts of the world tankers will stop arriving in late April.
Next month is going to be a real turning point.
And it is being reported that preparations are being made for when the price of oil reaches $200 a barrel…
Prediction market site Polymarket on Sunday reported that U.S. officials and Wall Street analysts have begun preparations for oil to top $200 a barrel as the Iran war continues and shows signs of possible escalation.
This occurs as the average price of gas across the United States remains just under $4 a gallon, but in some cities, such as San Francisco, is about to top $6 a gallon, according to data from crowdsourced gas app GasBuddy.
If the price of oil really does reach $200 a barrel, there will be extreme panic in the financial markets and everything will crash.
And the price of gasoline in the United States will be at levels we have never seen before.
If only someone would have warned us about all of this in advance, we could have gotten properly prepared.
But now nations all over the world find themselves completely and utterly unprepared for what is about to happen.
A real life nightmare is playing out right in front of our eyes, and it appears that we are still only in the very early stages.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
