Balancing Productivity and Stewardship with Fertilizer
Exploring the economic, environmental, and political forces behind modern fertilizer use
Too long, didn’t read:
The legacy: Fertilizer made modern agriculture possible but is now entangled in climate targets, water quality battles, and volatile geopolitics
The reality: Farmers are using smarter tools and better data, yet still carry the weight of environmental outcomes and shifting market demands
The bigger picture: Fertilizer use reaches far beyond the farm, touching everything from backyard lawns to global power struggles over key minerals
The story on fertilizer is way more involved than you think
Fertilizer might just be agriculture’s most paradoxical input. It has enabled one of humanity’s greatest achievements: the ability to feed billions of people on a finite amount of land. It’s hard to overstate its contribution to modern food security. Without synthetic nitrogen, the global population would look very different. Fertilizer remains one of the most effective tools in a farmer’s toolkit, driving yields, supporting economic viability, and enabling intensive production systems that sustain rural communities and global markets alike. Yet for all its value, fertilizer is also increasingly implicated in some of the most urgent environmental and political debates of our time. Conversations around water quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and global supply chain volatility inevitably lead back to how we fertilize the crops we grow.
Despite its centrality, the fertilizer conversation often remains piecemeal. We talk about nitrogen runoff in the Midwest, phosphorus loading in Lake Erie, or rising global potash prices, but rarely do we connect the dots in a way that reflects the full complexity of the system. Fertilizer use shapes soil health, public trust, regulatory priorities, and the long-term sustainability of agriculture itself. How we manage fertility on the farm affects not only yield potential but also the viability of the land we rely on, the quality of the water beneath our feet, the resilience of the climate we farm within, and the credibility of an industry facing increasing public and policy scrutiny. In that way, fertilizer is a mirror reflecting the broader tensions between productivity and stewardship that define agriculture today.
Where did fertilizer come from, and why do we rely on it so heavily?
Fertilizer, in some form, has supported agriculture since the earliest human settlements. Ancient farmers may not have understood chemistry, but they could see the difference in crop performance where livestock had roamed. Manure enriched soils and led to better harvests, establishing a basic but effective form of nutrient cycling. Over time, the practice grew more intentional. In both Europe and the United States, farmers began to collect bones, sometimes even purchasing them, grinding them into powder, and applying them to fields to supply nutrients that would otherwise be depleted by repeated planting. These early practices weren’t guided by formal science, but by observation, trial and error, and a growing awareness that the land required more than just labor to stay productive
The scientific breakthrough came in the 19th century with German chemist Justus von Liebig, whose Theory of Mineral Nutrients and Law of the Minimum laid the foundation for modern agronomy. Liebig’s work formalized what many farmers already sensed—that nutrients like nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) are essential to healthy plant growth, and that the scarcest one will always limit a crop’s potential. This understanding unlocked a new era, one that would accelerate dramatically with the development of the Haber-Bosch process in the early 20th century. By converting atmospheric nitrogen into synthetic fertilizer, the process made it possible to nourish crops at a scale never seen before.
During World War II, chemical manufacturing grew rapidly to meet military needs, and after the war, that capacity turned toward agriculture. Fertilizer production surged, food supplies recovered, and global population growth followed. The ability to feed more people more reliably became a defining achievement of the 20th century. But as production rose, so too did the need to grapple with the long-term consequences of how fertilizer is made, managed, and lost.
Dynamics of fertilizer across the globe
Today, fertilizer is deeply embedded in the architecture of modern agriculture. Companies like Nutrien, Mosaic, and UPL hold enormous economic and political influence. These firms operate far beyond the bounds of farm supply, engaging directly in the policymaking process through lobbying, research sponsorship, and strategic personnel shifts between the private sector and regulatory agencies. Their reach is broad, and their messaging is effective. With food security hanging in the balance, governments are understandably reluctant to challenge the practices of companies that supply the nutrients keeping harvests on track and food shelves stocked. Environmental concerns may emerge, but they’re often met with a reminder that’s hard to argue against: disrupting fertilizer production risks disrupting the global food supply. That framing is powerful, and it grants these companies significant leverage in shaping the rules they play by. I really can’t disagree with the path we’ve taken to get here, particularly as a member of a farm family. Fertilizer is a key driver behind plentiful harvests, and I don’t particularly want to see our current trend toward ever-increasing abundance disrupted, even if I wonder about unintended, negative indirect impacts of the current system.
But corporate politics is only part of the equation. Geography plays an equally pivotal role. The world’s phosphate reserves are not evenly distributed, and that asymmetry has consequences. More than 70 percent of known global reserves lie in Morocco, giving the region disproportionate control over a critical component of crop fertility. In an era where food security can be invoked as a national security issue, the country’s resource dominance gives it leverage on the world stage. That concentration of supply introduces a level of fragility to the system. Any political unrest, environmental disruption, or trade restriction in the region carries global implications.
The Russia-Ukraine war made this fragility painfully clear. Sanctions on Russia and Belarus—both major exporters of nitrogen and potash—sent shockwaves through global fertilizer markets. Belarus alone accounts for up to 20 percent of potash production. Natural gas prices, a key input in nitrogen production, surged in parallel, pushing fertilizer prices to historic highs. For farmers in Ukraine, the war’s impacts were immediate and devastating. Nearly 2.8 million hectares went unplanted in 2022, a 22 percent reduction in sown area. Globally, the consequences were even more dire. The Food Security Information Network reported that 258 million people faced acute food insecurity in 2022, the highest figure in the report’s history. Some farmers simply stopped applying fertilizer, forced by price volatility to gamble on lower input strategies that risked yield penalties. As prices rose and yields fell, the effects rippled outward, with commodity markets tightening, and the already fragile balance between supply and demand in global agriculture became even more precarious.
Taking a step back… What resources do plants actually need, and are they really getting them?
Crops need seventeen essential nutrients, but N, P, and K dominate the conversation. Nitrogen drives leafy growth. Phosphorus fuels root development and energy transfer. Potassium helps plants manage stress, water, and disease. Yet for all our technological advances, nutrient efficiency remains elusive. Much of the nitrogen we apply escapes, volatilizing into the atmosphere as ammonia, leaching into groundwater as nitrate, or transforming into nitrous oxide (N₂O), a greenhouse gas almost 300 times as potent as CO₂. Phosphorus, while less mobile, can be just as problematic. It binds to soil particles, and when those particles move during heavy rainfall or irrigation runoff, so does the phosphorus.
It’s easy to say the system is broken. But the truth is more complicated. Fertilizer efficiency has improved dramatically over the last several decades. Most farmers aren’t overapplying nutrients out of laziness or neglect. In fact, with today’s prices, no one can afford to. Variable rate technology, split applications, nitrification inhibitors, and precision sampling are becoming the new standard. Farmers are making data-driven decisions with tools that didn’t exist twenty years ago. And yet, the environmental outcomes remain problematic. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, fed by nutrient runoff from the Mississippi River Basin, reaches thousands of square miles every summer. Algal blooms in Lake Erie, driven largely by phosphorus from agriculture, have rendered municipal water undrinkable. In Iowa, the Des Moines Water Works case drew national attention to nitrate levels in drinking water and the murky legal territory where urban and rural interests collide.
None of this is helped by the growing prominence of carbon intensity (CI) as a metric for sustainable agriculture. Fertilizer is at the center of the emissions scoring for good reason. The upstream emissions from nitrogen production are massive. Add in the downstream losses from volatilization and leaching, and fertilizer becomes one of the largest contributors to a farm’s carbon footprint. Some CI modeling shows nitrogen alone accounting for more than half of a field’s total greenhouse gas emissions. As food companies, ethanol producers, and carbon markets lean more heavily into CI scoring, farmers will find themselves under increasing pressure to account for and reduce nutrient-related emissions.
Wait a second… Is agriculture really to blame?
The ag blame game only goes so far because fertilizer is being applied far beyond the farm. In fact, turfgrass in the US, including lawns, golf courses, parks, and public spaces, receives staggering amounts of nitrogen each year. One estimate puts the annual total at nearly 90 million pounds of N, much of it applied with little precision, timing, or regard for runoff. Let’s run the numbers. A typical bag of commercial lawn fertilizer recommends 1 pound of nitrogen per 1,000 square feet. That equates to 43.5 pounds per acre. Apply that three or four times a year, and you’re pushing an amount of nitrogen comparable to many corn acres in the Midwest. But without split applications, accounting for weather, thinking about plant uptake or performing soil tests, the efficiency of that turf nitrogen is often abysmal. And yet, when water quality lawsuits are filed and nitrate standards are debated, the spotlight rarely turns to the suburbs.
That’s not to excuse agricultural fertilizer pollution. But it is to say that if we’re serious about nutrient management, we need to widen the frame. Because if we don’t consider all of the fertilizer users, we won’t have an accurate understanding of the problems.
At the end of the day, fertilizer remains a significant piece of the puzzle
Still, the responsibility on farmers is real and growing. So, what does a path forward look like? It starts with aligning incentives. Conservation programs need to be farmer-friendly but reward real-world outcomes, weather permitting. Carbon markets need to credit reductions in nutrient losses. Food companies need to support low-CI sourcing with real premiums. And state and federal policy needs to take a more holistic view—one that considers both the environmental and economic dimensions of fertility management.
Farmers want to be part of the solution; they already are, in many cases. But the burden of sustainability cannot rest on their shoulders alone. Fertilizer is everyone’s problem, and that means the solutions must be shared. We have to build a food system that can endure—economically, environmentally, and agronomically. Fertilizer helped get us here. Now we have to decide what role it plays in getting us through.
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At Serō Ag Strategies, we bridge farmers and supply chain partners by transforming complex agricultural data and policy into actionable insights. We also work to create and grow markets for commodity crops by aligning production with evolving demand, policy shifts, and sustainability goals. Combining multinational expertise with the personal touch of boutique consulting, we specialize in economic and sustainability analysis that drives strategic innovation.
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