Reed Keahey fills his crop-dusting plane with 7,500 gallons of Jet-A fuel at a time. In February, just before the Iran war broke out, that fuel cost $2.46 a gallon. By May it peaked at $4.11, and a single fill-up ran him a little more than $30,000. This week the price sat at $3.18 and was climbing again. Keahey, an agriculture pilot based in Columbia, Louisiana, has been eating the difference rather than passing it on to the farmers who hire him.
As he told CBS News:
"It puts a squeeze, but I can't let my farmers feel that squeeze that it's putting on me."
That one line captures the arithmetic threatening rural America right now. The Iran war has choked off the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage that handles roughly 20 percent of the world's oil, and the consequences have rippled straight into the fuel tanks and fertilizer bins of farm country. Nearly half of global urea exports originate in the Persian Gulf, and intermittent closures of the strait have triggered a shipping crisis that is hammering producers from northeast Louisiana to the Carolinas and beyond.
David and Theresa Guererro run a farming operation in the same stretch of northeast Louisiana. They rely on urea nitrogen fertilizer for their corn crops. This season, the Guererros are overbudget on urea alone by roughly $120,000 to $130,000, money that did not exist in their plan and may not exist in their margins.
Asked whether the farm can survive the cost spike, David Guererro offered a blunt answer: "It's close, it's real close."
The Guererros are not outliers. Across the country, farm bankruptcies have surged, with the American Farm Bureau Federation reporting a 46 percent increase from 2024. That figure was climbing before the Iran war added a fresh layer of cost pressure. Now the question is how many more operations will tip over the edge.
Price is only half the problem. Some farmers may not be able to get fertilizer at any price. About 15 percent of U.S. fertilizer imports come from the Middle East, and roughly half the global supply of urea and 30 percent of ammonia originate in the region, AP News reported. Tennessee farmer Todd Littleton expects to pay $100,000 more for fertilizer this season, a 40 percent spike from last year.
Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, warned that availability itself is now in doubt:
"We're being told that many of our farmers that haven't preordered their fertilizer and paid for it may not even obtain the fertilizer that they're going to need during the season or for spring planting."
That is not a price complaint. It is a supply alarm. If fields go unplanted or under-fertilized because inputs never arrive, the downstream effects hit grocery shelves months later, and they hit hardest in the households least able to absorb the blow.
Harry Ott of the South Carolina Farm Bureau put it plainly: "It is a really dire situation that our farmers facing."
The mechanism is straightforward. The Iran war disrupted one of the world's most critical energy and chemical shipping corridors. The Strait of Hormuz sits at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and its intermittent closures have snarled tanker traffic, spiked crude prices, and sent the cost of petroleum-derived products, jet fuel, diesel, and the natural-gas-intensive fertilizers that modern agriculture depends on, sharply higher.
For an agriculture pilot like Keahey, the math is personal. At $4.11 a gallon, his fuel bill nearly doubled from pre-war levels. He chose to absorb the hit because the alternative was pricing himself out of the market, or pushing farmers who were already bleeding red ink into insolvency.
"If the farmers aren't in business, then I'm not in business."
That interdependence is the story Washington tends to overlook. The pilot needs the farmer. The farmer needs affordable fertilizer. The fertilizer needs a shipping lane. When any link breaks, the whole chain strains, and the people who bear the cost are not policy analysts in think tanks but families running tractors in Columbia, Louisiana.
American agriculture was already under severe financial stress before the first missile flew. Nearly 60 percent of U.S. farmers have reported worsening finances as fertilizer and fuel costs climbed over recent years. Record debt loads, thin margins, and volatile commodity prices had already pushed thousands of operations to the brink.
Government relief efforts have drawn criticism for falling short of the scale of the problem. The 46 percent jump in farm bankruptcies documented by the American Farm Bureau Federation predates the Iran war's worst price shocks, which means the true toll of this year's disruptions has not yet been fully counted.
Regulatory burdens compound the pressure. In California, farmers have reported regulatory costs as high as $1,600 per acre crushing family operations, costs that exist entirely apart from global energy markets but land on the same balance sheets.
And the pain does not stop at the farm gate. When input costs spike, food prices follow. Consumers have already watched tomato prices climb 40 percent as trade policy, war costs, and weather collide at the grocery aisle. Fertilizer shortages and fuel surcharges will only accelerate that trend.
Keahey's phrase, "Right now, it's a game of survival", is not rhetoric. It is a description of what happens when global conflict meets an agricultural sector already running on fumes. The Guererros are $130,000 over budget on a single input. Keahey is subsidizing his own customers to keep them in business. Farmers across the South and Midwest are scrambling for fertilizer that may not arrive in time for planting.
None of these people started the war. None of them closed the Strait of Hormuz. But all of them are paying the price, in fuel bills, in fertilizer invoices, and in sleepless nights spent wondering whether the operation they built will survive another season.
Washington can debate grand strategy. Rural America has to plant.