Eight projects. $1.34 billion. About 1.08 million tons of combined annual capacity. That is what USDA announced Oct. 22 under FIELDS, the Fertilizer Investment & Expansion for Long-Term Domestic Supply program. About $573 million of the total is federal money with private investment making up the rest.
Vice President J.D. Vance announced the awards in North Platte, Neb., and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins called them “a farmer-first step toward American fertilizer independence.”
Josh Linville, vice president of fertilizer at StoneX, doesn’t dispute the direction. “There’s some good ones in here. I’d like to see more,” he says. But he adds: “I think it falls short.”
What’s on the list
Linville sorts the eight projects into builders and head-scratchers. His favorites expand or stabilize plants that already run. PCI Nitrogen, which gets $100 million to modernize plants in Pasadena, Texas, and St. Helens, Ore., is “towards the top of the list for me as far as ones that look good,” he says.
“You’re expanding some of that production that we’ve already got. That’s what we need. We need to build on what we already have.”
He gives the same nod to Intrepid Potash’s $139 million sulfate of potash facility near Carlsbad, N.M., with a caveat.
“I’ve been one that’s been kind of against expanding potash production. We’ve got plenty of it. Prices are stable. But again, it’s not the worst thing in the world,” he says.
The skepticism lands on the newer ideas. TalusAg plans 20 modular ammonia units across 11 sites in seven states.
“These mobile units, they’re very high cost of production. They only work with either big government subsidies or in the worst of times, which frankly we’re living with right now,” Linville says. He leaves room to be wrong: “These very well may be the thing that actually finally figured it out.”
Then there is Agriculture Project Holdco, the largest award at about $116.9 million, to turn dairy manure into liquid ammonium nitrate in Kansas and Indiana. The listed capacity is about 4,100 tons a year. Linville hoped that was a typo.
“I want so bad for this to be a mistype. I want it to be misinformation. They are missing a couple zeros.”
AgWeb’s project table lists the same figure. His concern with manure-based products is practical: “the fertilizer content in that new product is so low, it’s hard to move that very far away.”
The math and the timeline
Add up the listed capacities and the total comes to roughly 1.08 million tons a year, spread across ammonia, UAN, potash, sulfur, and blended products. Linville puts that against the nitrogen the U.S. buys abroad.
“You add all those up, you’re still not even coming close to, you know, again, look at it from a urea perspective. We import 5 to 5.5 million tons,” he says.
Relief will take time.
“I am going to guess it’s going to take years before any of these have any sort of impact in terms of actual supply coming to the marketplace,” he says.
What would move the needle, in his view, is something the list mostly skips.
“It still doesn’t really hit the one thing we truly need, which is expanded major nitrogen production, expanded major urea production,” he says. The U.S. has the raw material, but the biggest hurdle to getting such plants built is financing.
“We’ve got cheap gas. We have plentiful gas. We need to be supporting new competition with new large-scale production for nitrogen fertilizers.”
He still gives the administration credit for acting. “Does it fall short? Absolutely. But at least they’re trying to do something. It’s a step in the right direction.” His hope is that this round spurs more, perhaps “after midterms are done next week.”
What the awards don’t touch for 2027
The pressure on next year’s costs is coming from outside the U.S., starting with Europe. Dutch TTF natural gas climbed above $30 per MMBtu, more than double the recent $7 to $14 norm. As gas rises, European plants that lose money on every ton shut down, and Linville is blunt about why.
“The only thing any of them are supposed to do is make money.”
The next step is what hits farmers here. European growers don’t skip nitrogen because a local plant is idle.
“That European farmer in that supply chain is going to go look through the world and they’re going to say, I got to replace these tons. Where do I find them?” he says.
Sellers in North Africa take notice, and prices rise at every floor.
His conclusion: “It doesn’t matter if you’re in the U.S., if you’re in Brazil. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Europe. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Australia. Your price is going up as a result of that newfound demand coming out and competing with the rest of the world for those tons.”
The issues in the Strait of Hormuz sit behind much of it. Qatar, Iran, and Saudi Arabia accounted for 14.7 million tons of 2025 urea exports, about a third of the global total. Phosphate suffers too, because the closure also pinches ammonia and sulfur.
A hypothetical best-case scenario may be far-fetched.
“We reopen the Strait. We get normal vessel traffic. We get production back up and going,” he says of the fix, which would “devastate global prices to the benefit of farmers.”
Until then, the cost of making a ton of DAP is “so large” that he expects more plants to idle, as one in Fort Meade, Fla., did a few weeks ago. He doesn’t see a domestic cure.
“I don’t think that the answer on how to solve it sits in the United States,” he says, pointing instead to long-term supply agreements with Morocco, Norway, and Saudi Arabia.
All of this lands on a falling corn market. New-crop corn went from about $4.25 to $5.50 and back to roughly $4.50 in a short span.
“It’s gone from depression to excitement and now back to confusion, to depression, and no idea how do we go forward and survive next year,” Linville says.
What farmers can do this fall
Linville expects fall demand to hold up, since yields are looking better than expected and “we’re pulling nutrients out of the ground.” He sees a lull coming first.
“I do think the market goes very quiet here for the next month or two,” he says. “Past that, it’s really hard to start making a play for why prices need to go down. I have a lot more paths on why it goes higher.”
His advice leans on timing: volatility will be the only constant, jump on opportunities when they arrive, and “there is no rule saying all tons have to be bought at once.”
“We are going to plant next year and we’ll survive another one,” Linville says, “but it’s just getting harder and harder on them.”
