Corn Is Out, Soy Is In on U.S. Farms Rocked by Soaring Costs

Two crops dominate U.S. farming: corn and soybeans. The former requires massive amounts of fertilizer. The latter requires very little.

Which is why the astronomical surge in fertilizer prices -- they’re up some 27% this year and 130% over the past year -- is causing farmers to quickly re-calibrate the amount of each crop they put in the ground this spring. They’ll dedicate about 2 million more acres this year to soy, a Bloomberg survey finds, and about 2 million fewer to corn.

One hundred of the acres in that switch are happening on Tim Gregerson’s farm on the plains just north of Omaha, Nebraska. Gregerson fancies himself a corn guy first and foremost. @CornKng333 is his Twitter handle and he always puts more corn in the ground than soy. But when fertilizer prices spiked anew in January, he decided to bring his corn-to-soy ratio closer to 50-50. And that was even before Russia, the world’s biggest fertilizer producer, invaded Ukraine and sent prices skyrocketing even more.

“Fertilizer is out of control,” Gregerson says.