I’ve been thinking about the war in Iran and how it’s restricting fertilizer shipments. I’m trying to understand how this could impact the food supply in 2027, assuming the Strait of Hormuz stays closed indefinitely. To my surprise, my mind dug up several distinct memories that helped me develop a contextual framework for the situation. Stay with me; you’ll see the big picture by the time you’ve finished reading this.
My first memory is from 1995, when I took Oregon State University’s Master Gardener program. One class was taught in the college’s main auditorium because the professor needed a big movie screen for a slide presentation. The images made such an impression on me, they’ve crossed my mind hundreds of times since.
The presentation was about soil, specifically the soil food web. The instructor used a microscope to photograph the vast web of creatures that inhabit healthy soil. Many looked like tiny dinosaurs, and I was mesmerized. Suddenly, soil, which I had previously seen as an inanimate thing, became a vibrant ecosystem teeming with life. I wondered whether the big agricultural chemical companies studied the effects of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides on soil microbes.
The next memory was from a film made in 2007 titled “King Corn.” One of the two young filmmakers, Curt Ellis, grew up in Oregon. He and his college friend Ian Cheney met at Yale and then traveled to Iowa to make the film. They tracked an acre of corn grown with chemically intensive, industrialized farming methods to see where the crop landed in the American food system. Most of it becomes animal feed and corn syrup.
Another memory is from a video I saw on YouTube. A Midwestern farmer sifted a handful of soil through his fingers — soil that had grown industrialized corn for decades. It was pale, dry, and dusty, much like talcum powder. I imagined the only things it could grow without chemical fertilizer were sticks or Styrofoam.
Fast-forward about a decade to my tour of the Siri & Sons organic farm just outside St. Paul, Oregon. The farm’s rich, black soil seemed like a cross between brownies and coffee grounds. Since it looked delicious enough to eat, I wanted to mix some with water and make a mud pie, small dinosaurs and all.
You can see why I’ve been wondering what depleted soil can grow if synthetic fertilizers become scarce. We may know more by the fall of 2027. If corn and soybean yields come in low, we could see higher prices in foods that depend heavily on animal feed, including milk and other dairy products, eggs, and meat.
Now you know the little story behind the big fertilizer story.