Growing the Future

Your Fertilizer Price Is Set Half a World Away

Episode Summary

They said prices would settle. They didn’t. They said the market would stabilize. It hasn’t. They said this year wouldn’t be as bad as the last. Guess what? Now, farmers across Western Canada are staring down a brutal reality—soaring input costs, a shaky global supply chain, and a market that feels more like a runaway train than a reliable system. Fertilizer pricing isn’t just unpredictable—it’s wild. And if you don’t understand the forces behind it, you might find yourself paying too much, too late… or worse, left with nothing at all when you need it most. This one-hour live webinar is for the farmer who needs real answers. The retailer who’s playing defense. The ag professional looking for a sign of where this thing is headed.

Episode Notes

A fertilizer quote in Western Canada is the last step in a chain that starts with export policy, damaged infrastructure, shipping lanes and industrial gas prices on the other side of the world.

Josh Linville analyses that chain for a living. Recorded ahead of the 2025 season, this conversation walks through the specific pressure points that were moving the market, and in doing so lays out how the market is actually built.

What's Inside

• How an export restriction in a single country removes millions of tons from global trade and what that does downstream
• The pipeline and port infrastructure losses that took a large share of global ammonia export capacity out of service
• Why a concentration of urea production in one region makes a handful of shipping chokepoints into a pricing input
• What high natural gas costs did to European nitrogen production, and why that puts European buyers in competition with North American ones
• The phosphate picture: reduced exports, trade duties, and what that leaves for regional supply
• Where potash actually comes from, and why trade politics matter more than supply does
• What pushed sulphur and ammonium sulphate, including a driver most producers have never thought about
• Why a local price can move for reasons that have nothing to do with anything local
  
  
  Connect with Growing the Future
• Website: growingthefuture.ca
• YouTube: Growing the Future
• Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast
• LinkedIn: Growing the Future
  
  Subscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag.