Dion Letcher's family has run a fertilizer business in Garden City, Minnesota, on the flat plains south of Mankato since the Eisenhower administration. Letcher is still not sure how to explain the accelerated costs of the chemical nutrients farmers use to feed corn and soybeans.
"Fertilizer is probably not going down for a year or more," Letcher said on Tuesday, noting producers in China, Venezuela and Russia. "Because a lot of fertilizer comes from kind of dictator-y countries that kind of don't like us too much."
For the last two years, the cost of retail fertilizer has shot up. At April's end, agriculture journalists with DTN tracked the price at $1,090 a ton, highest since 2008.
