This is from a friend who is a farmer. He told me the cost of water is becoming astronomical as well. It’s almost $800 per acre ft.
pic.twitter.com/CGEy4OGnz0— Tamika Hamilton (@TamikaGHamilton) March 14, 2022
Posted on 03/15/2022 12:10:35 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
As inflation wholesale prices soar past 10 percent and gas prices continue to surge, economists and farmers across the country are warning about another looming crisis.
Farmers are seeing a fertilizer shortage. Combined with high water and fuel prices, costs are set to soar as food becomes less available.
Convo with farm today:
- Meat processors booked out a year because stockpiling beef.
- Farmers in South can’t get fertilizer for crops now.
- Farmers in Midwest are switching, can’t get nitrogen nor fertilizer.
Buckle up, folks! The media isn’t even warning you. #economy— Douglas Karr (@douglaskarr) March 11, 2022
This is from a friend who is a farmer. He told me the cost of water is becoming astronomical as well. It’s almost $800 per acre ft.
pic.twitter.com/CGEy4OGnz0— Tamika Hamilton (@TamikaGHamilton) March 14, 2022
From Market Watch:
Fertilizer prices were already running red hot this year before a European energy crisis fanned the flames, potentially adding to a pinch on farmers in the U.S. and around the world and stoking worries about food inflation.
“It’s almost like a perfect storm of different reasons that probably has a lot of upside in price for different macronutrients,” said Samuel Taylor, Cleveland-based executive director of research at Rabobank, in a phone interview.
Natural gas is a key ingredient in the process used to make nitrogen-based fertilizers used on a range of crops, including corn and wheat. Natural gas accounts for 75% to 90% of operating costs in the production of nitrogen, Taylor noted.
Do the geniuses in this “kill-fossil-fuels” administration realize that natural gas is a key ingredient for fertilizer? Natural gas accounts for 75% to 90% of operating costs in the production of nitrogen. Their war on energy is freezing AND starving us. https://t.co/4Dtsf99h8G— David Asman (@DavidAsmanfox) March 10, 2022
Some are warning the Russian invasion into Ukraine, resulting in new sanctions on the Kremlin, will make it much worse. Fertilizer companies in Russia are sounding the alarm. From Reuters:
A global food crisis looms unless the war in Ukraine is stopped because fertiliser prices are soaring so fast that many farmers can no longer afford soil nutrients, Russian fertiliser and coal billionaire Andrei Melnichenko said on Monday.
"The events in Ukraine are truly tragic. We urgently need peace," Melnichenko, 50, who is Russian but was born in Belarus and has a Ukrainian mother, told Reuters in a statement emailed by his spokesman.
"One of the victims of this crisis will be agriculture and food," he said.
CORRECTION: Russian fertilizer and coal billionaire Andrei Melnichenko said a global food crisis looms unless the war in Ukraine is stopped. We are deleting a previous video that contained an incorrect company name https://t.co/DunDNnQYVL pic.twitter.com/cIf5LHrhTO— Reuters (@Reuters) March 14, 2022
No, it’s intentional.
I went to Southern States two days ago to buy seed. I asked about fertilizer and was told they still had some. Another worker chimed in that the availability was probably due to its high price. Then I was told the manager had told the employees that once this is gone there is no
more in the immediate supply chain. Im 50’x50’ but the thousand acre wheat farmer is probably hearing the same thing.
If I don’t use fertilizer on my front lawn it stops growing almost entirely after June. Nice for not having to mow but looks like crap. The back yard gets natural fertilizer from berries that fall and get mulched up so it doesn’t require much of any added fertilizer.
What? Why? Is this funny?
Have you ever seen a corn or wheat field?
Gasoline goes up and up and up and that’s why food prices rise.
Food delivered by huge semis to every store in town at 5 a.m. so shelves are stocked by opening time.
I think you’re correct. The gas prices are rising everyplace.
Slo-Joe refuses to encourage drilling for our own natural supply of oil.
“for no fertilizer, depending on the shape your soil is in, you might see only a slight decrease in yield...the first year”
Ok, so that doesn’t sound Apocalyptic.
Hey Katie, why don't you leave your bubble, and spend some time in flyover country?
Yes, prices will be going up this year. No, there won't be any food "shortages" in the US. Our farmers in the Great Plains, and across the nation, will do their jobs, and this country will be fed.
I've turned off the TV, thanks to the media's over the top negativity.
Do you mulch or bag?
Actually I have many times. It would be a little more work but extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. They did it forever before, is this knowledge now lost? Or is it politically incorrect?
Lefties: “This is BS. Everyone knows food comes from the grocery store.”
Mulch but that isn’t enough to sustain the front lawn.
It’s only the feed lots for beef cattle and the dairy farms when the cows are being milked where manure accumulates and could be collected. Beef cattle spend most of their lives in the field where collecting manure would be tough, plus it needs to go back into the ground to grow more grass and even then, they occasionally have to fertilize due to their monocrop being grass. Likewise with dairy cows. They spend most of the day in the field and their manure is needed there. The manure in beef cattle feed lots has all sorts of nasty stuff in it. Hormones, antibiotics etc and at least has to be composted.
There is a method called regenerative agriculture where nitrogen fixing legumes are planted once a year, then that’s knocked down with a roller/crimper and corn is no-till planted right into it. Soil is pre-mulched and fertilized.
Mob grazing is a technique that dumps a lot of manure at once without eating the forage down to 2 inch stubs. It regrows quick and lush and the soil always has a good thick layer of plant life. No fields are burned and are rarely mowed. Forage is stockpiled for the winter. In other words, keep them off of it so there’s 2-3 foot tall growth going into winter. There will be enough green stuff hiding down lower and very little if any supplemental hay is needed.
Both are no till techniques that always leaves the soil covered and builds natural soil instead of losing it and/or dumping chemicals on it. No run off, no dust bowls, both of which still happen today but the clouds of dust are paler than the great dust bowl of the 30s because the soil is crappier.
But Big AG likes chemicals from Big Chem and politicians like their campaign donations from both and Big AG and Big Chem have a rotating door with the EPA and USDA.
That and the sustainable techniques require planning and a lot of thought put into it and most farmer’s want the easy button way. Fire up the tractor and dump white powder on it. It also doesn’t scale up to Big AG size yet but is getting closer. We need a lot more 80-800 acre farmers instead of 20,000 acre farmers with soy/corn/wheat monocrops and GPS controlled machines. The processed foodstuff made from soy/corn is crap anyway.
Need a lot more than just more small farmers of course. Need local/regional processing and distribution systems but that would require legislation and rule changes. People need to learn to cook instead of 4 easy steps printed on the back of the box. Anyone with a yard needs to garden. Anyone with a bit of land needs to grow animal based protein, even if just eggs. Need animals that are bred for smaller operations.
Instead of “a chicken in every pot”, we need a start to finish chicken production and distribution system in every county that’s not city. Likewise with beef and pork. The number of universities teaching useless woke stuff compared to the number teaching how to grow food needs to be reversed. Just like the millions of Vo-Tech schools there are, we need millions that teach small AG.
Screw all these service and office jobs making walmart and amazon bigger. Feed some people instead.
There are millions of microscopic life forms in healthy soil. Big AG soil, not so much.
(rant off)
Beg to differ.
It’s already here.
Obviously not the Great Tribulation, but I am convinced that when Trump lost, it clock started ticking.
Harvest the hot air coming out of D.C.
What's worse, cattle and horses also tend to pass broad leaf killers, such as picloram, straight through. Picloram is widely sprayed on hay fields, where it kills broad leaf and plants, and allows some grasses to thrive. Corn and wheat, which are members of the grasses family, suffer from reduced production when exposed to picloram. Soybeans, and basically any other crop that is not a grass, are devastated.
“Need local/regional processing and distribution systems but that would require legislation and rule changes.”
THIS is the huge one. Regulations lock out the little guy.
Excellent post man. Thank you. Absolutely, there are many forks that can be done so that we can be independent from DuPont.
All of us who put stuff away and who have prepared some and have a bug out place will find a way to survive.
But if people think the cities are bad now, wait till the EBT card users can’t get what they want and the cities themselves become food deserts. Than the peanut butter will hit the fan.
Since some of this discussion involves manure, I have a ‘manure story’ that I learned about firsthand a few days ago. It’s a bit off topic but some may find it interesting or useful.
Recently I took part in a half day webinar that mainly dealt with environmental subject matter… clean water, clean air etc. but there some speakers that dealt with EPA regulatory matters. One of the speakers started talking about something called PFAS which an acronym for a family of chemicals called per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances. I was not familiar with what PFAS is but as I learned, it’s the synthetic chemical used in nonstick cookware and water resistant clothing (Teflon), food packaging, electronics and in some sprays used for fire fighting.
Anyway, the EPA has identified about 12,000 different types of PFAS and are going after them because of potential toxicity and linkage to types of cancer etc….. this more or less came on their radar in 2006 when they struck an agreement with the manufacturers to phase them out.
One of many things the EPA has been doing is testing dairy milk for PFAS. One particular farmer was found to have high levels in the milk they were supplying and in the end, they culled the complete herd. However this only made a marginal difference and they culled the complete herd a second time and a third time. I’m probably missing a bunch of details here but at some point they tested the grass in their pasture and found that it was high in PFAS. This was traced to the ‘manure’ they were putting on their property…. Turns out they were spreading biosolids on their fields from the local ‘sludge treatment and drying’ outfit that looks after municipal sewage waste. While using municipal waste ‘biosolids’ for fertilizer is an acceptable practice, it seems that this issue of PFAS was something that no one thought would be an issue until the EPA starting their testing program on the milk.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
