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By: Josh Linville, Vice President- Fertilizer
We use a Midwest average of terminals due to the difficulty in tracking a single plant/storage site.
We believe that only looking at the flat price of either can be misleading:
We look at the ratio “value” to get a better indication of where we are or how many bushels of X does it take to pay for 1 ton of fertilizer.
Would you rather:
When we compare the current ratio value against recent years, we start to see if we are high or low.
Pay more attention to the horizontal dotted line as it compares the current phosphate price against new crop values.
YOUR VALUES WILL LOOK DIFFERENT
This graph looks at the Midwest NH3 average price vs the flat grain price. There are no logistics on either product. Your location will look different due to fertilizer logistical costs, grain basis, etc.
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A cluster of positives has finally tilted the fertilizer market toward buyers, from China's return to normal urea exports to fresh Moroccan phosphate cargoes bound for the U.S. Yet the whole picture still hinges on one waterway, and a prolonged standoff around the Strait of Hormuz could unwind those gains before spring.
Fertilizer supply now depends on a handful of contested shipping lanes and pipelines stretching from the Middle East to Northern Europe. Here is how the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea, Russia’s shadow fleet and the Nord Stream pipeline are reshaping where nitrogen, phosphate and potash actually move.
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