In a press conference featuring industry leaders and farmers, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced a $500 million program, Fertilizer Investment & Expansion for Long-term Domestic Supply (FIELDS), alongside EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden.
The FIELDS program is a USDA grant program meant to help expand fertilizer production in the U.S. It helps companies and other eligible groups build new fertilizer facilities, expand existing ones, and improve storage or transportation. Rollins explained, the idea is that if more fertilizer is made and moved efficiently in the U.S., farmers may have more supply options and a more dependable fertilizer market.
“We’ve got to get all of this back to America and get it back very quickly. Now, will this all be done in a year? No, but we’re setting up the infrastructure so that for the long term our farmers have the what they need at the price that they need so that they continue to pass down their farms and we can continue to be the world’s greatest source and breadbasket of food, fuel, and clothing for the future,” Rollins said. “It is not lost on me as we celebrate 250 years that this country was built by farmers, it was built by agriculture and and getting back to that and putting that back into the middle of the national conversation, I think is one of the most important things President Trump has done.”
How Is This Program Different?
Previoulsy, the Biden administration launched its $900 million grant program, Fertilizer Production Expansion Program (FPEP.)
Rollins said of the 121 FPEP projects, only eight were completed.
“There were several in there looking at worm worms and flower pots and kombucha–lots of climate language craziness. We are obviously pulling all of that back,” Rollins said.
FIELDS is different because of its focus.
Deputy Secretary Vaden said, “what we’re seeking to do here is we’re looking for quality over quantity–speed over using money to come up with plans for projects that don’t yet exist, and people who already have capital behind them, who already have plans to build, are in the process of building, and a strategic injection of capital can move that forward and get farmers fertilizer faster.”
One example was spoken about by Joshua Westling, CEO J. Westling & Co., LLC, which develops and builds greenfield nitrogen fertilizer plants. A recent project is a $1.2 billion nitrogen complex in Gothenburg, Nebraska with capacity of 365,000 tons of UAN and 140,000 tons of ammonium thiosulfate.
“New production is urgently needed–all of it American made, all of it sold to American farmers,” he says. “ But building a fertilizer plant in this country is a daunting task. The hardest part isn’t the engineering, it’s the upfront capital.”
Interagency Collaboration
To illustrate how today’s announcement builds on the Trump agenda, Rollins started the press conference announcement with a list of “wins” for the Trump administration:
- waving the Jones Act for an additional 90 days
- waiving import restrictions from Venezuela
- EPA revising diesel exhaust fuels rules
- Department of Interior adding potash to the critical mineral list
- Department of Justice antitrust investigations
- waiving counter-veiling duties on Morroccan phosphate
- Department of Energy’s Energy Dominance Financing Program, which includes fertilizer production
Fertilizer Market Update
Rollins also pointed to the private industry for examples in addressing farmer concerns of higher input prices.
“Great American companies like CF Industries delayed scheduled maintenance to prioritize supply for American farmers this year. Pivot bio, another great one, locked in pricing through 2028 in an effort to support our American farmers,” she said.
She also called out CF Industries soon-to-be completed ammonia complex.
“I’ll be in Louisiana in about three weeks, where we are going to be officially breaking ground on on the Blue Point project there, which will be the largest ammonia plant in the world when completed,” she said.
But during questions and answers, Deputry Secretary Vaden addressed the ongoing DOJ antitrust inquiries.
“Both the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are investigating both civilly and criminally the fertilizer market, and what they’re looking at there is, is the fertilizer market actually responding the way we would expect a free market to respond, or has there been collusion in determining where fertilizer goes, not just here domestically but overseas,” Vaden said.
