As farmers feel the pinch of war, organic farmers are finding themselves insulated from fuel and fertilizer price spikes.
It’s no secret that today’s American farmer is weathering a cascade of compounding shocks, even in the context of decades of tumult. Whether it’s the past year’s drought and this year’s cold snap, or market disruptions from tariffs and the trade war, requiring a bail-out, farmers have been blindsided by events out of their control.
Now, the fertilizer cost crisis inflamed by the United States and Israel’s war on Iran has exposed farmers around the world to a new headache. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has blocked the nearly 30% of synthetic fertilizers that normally pass through it, causing prices to spike. In a Farm Bureau survey conducted just a month and a half into the war, 70% of farmers said they were unable to afford all the fertilizer they needed.
Recently, the USDA’s Fertilizer Investment and Expansion for Long Term Domestic Supply, or FIELDS, program announced a $500 million investment in domestic synthetic fertilizer production, “in order to provide agricultural producers with additional domestic fertilizer options and strengthen the U.S. fertilizer supply chain.”
But perhaps rather than further entrenching in synthetics, now might be a time to reexamine our dependency on fossil fuels. While conventional farmers across the country scramble to cover the rising fertilizer costs, organic farmers, who constitute a little less than 1% of farmland in the United States and 3% of farm receipts, have remained relatively unscathed.
Smaller organic farmers like Daniel Gladstone of Oechsner Farms are insulated from the cost crisis by their use of sustainable soil practices like cover cropping and alternative fertilization techniques. Gladstone’s organic grain farm in Tompkins County, New York, utilizes red clover to naturally replenish nitrogen in the soil.
“The ingrained resilience of our system is kind of shining right now, I would say,” said Gladstone.
Synthetic fertilizers can not be used in organic farming; Oechsner Farms is just one example of organic farms around the country that have fostered alternative nitrogen sources like cover crops, manure, and compost for decades. Now, as the Iran War has conventional farms staring down the barrel of sharp price hikes to fertilizer, organic farms may reap the fruits of their investment in the soil.
The Science
Synthetic fertilizers find their home in the Strait of Hormuz because of their use of urea and anhydrous ammonia, both produced using an energy-intensive process requiring natural gas abundant in that region of the world. Gulf countries affected by the Iran War were the single biggest regional exporter of these chemicals for the past three years.
Cover crops—mostly leguminous plants like clover, beans, peas, and vetch, strategically planted at organic farms—bypass the need for gas and offer a natural nitrogen supply alternative.
Laurie Drinkwater, a professor specializing in soil quality and agroecology at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Science, said that over the years she’s fielded expanding interest from conventional farmers in growing legumes whenever oil prices spiked. “The conventional farmers relying on fertilizer were thinking maybe they needed to try to diversify their rotations,” Drinkwater said.
“The approach is ultimately more efficient. You retain more nitrogen in the system, you build organic matter, there are benefits that affect the microbial community, the soil community,” Drinkwater explained. As cover crops pull nitrogen from the air through bacteria in their roots, their primary energy source becomes the sun, instead of fossil fuels. By shedding that dependency, organic farms aren’t exposed to oil price shocks in the same way as their conventional counterparts. “It’s not just that you substitute, you know, one form of nitrogen for another, it’s that growing the nitrogen in your field has a really different outcome.”
Mark Kimball, owner of the small, organic Essex Farm in Essex County, New York, said that a mix of cover cropping alongside the utilization of compost and manure has given him a sense of security.
Over the years she’s fielded expanding interest from conventional farmers in growing legumes whenever oil prices spiked.
“I can go five, maybe 10 years right now with no fertilizer and make the farm run,” said Kimball. “If you look at it as an endowment, if you’ve been building your organic matter and your soil, 50% of the nutrients might be used in a given year and 50% stay attached to the carbon that you gave.”
Besides cover crops, Gladstone and Kimball enhance their farms’ soil with cow manure and chicken litter. While Kimball’s farm, which houses livestock, is able to create enough of their own manure to spread throughout the acreage, Gladstone’s farm purchases manure from a nearby dealer, Friendly Blends, in order to keep transportation costs to a minimum.
Cleason Horst, founder of Friendly Blends in Canandaigua, New York, said that business is up by about 10%.
“I have had a number of farmers call me that I suspect otherwise would never have called me,” Horst said. That includes conventional farmers. “Manure is still about half or even a third of the cost of [synthetic] fertilizer. So some conventional farmers start looking at manure.” Horst cautioned, however, that transportation costs quickly add up, and it’s a less scalable, local solution.
The Business
While organic fruits and vegetables have always cost more than their conventional counterparts, conventional farms bearing the brunt of rising fertilizer costs means that that price gap could shrink.
That would continue a trend of organic premiums decreasing relative to the cost of conventional produce, according to a report by USDA’s Economic Research Service. The report also notes that food price inflation in 2022 disproportionately affected conventional produce prices more than those of organics.
As elevated fuel and fertilizer prices keep up, it’s possible that the country’s organic market could see continued growth. A 40-year study by the Rodale Institute found that organic farms use 45% less energy than their conventional counterparts. Even before the war, organic produce grew faster than the overall market for the past two years. Comparatively higher savings could help organic production continue its ascent in 2026.
But not all organic farms are created equal. Klaas Martens of Seneca Grain & Bean, an organic farm in the Finger Lakes Region of New York, criticizes large-scale, “industrial organic” farms for basically replicating this vulnerability, merely replacing conventional farming inputs with pricier, organic equivalents.
For instance, large organic farms can opt out of the careful science of cover cropping by using “Chilean fertilizer,” a nitrate salt mined from the Atacama Desert; it costs significantly more than synthetic fertilizer but preserves a farms organic designation. Critics have argued that the salt carries similar environmental risks to synthetics and goes against the spirit of sustainable nitrogen production, with some unsuccessfully petitioning in 2002 to have it removed from organic production.
“The best conventional farmers, when they switch to organic become the best organic farmers. They apply those well-developed management skills in an organic system.”
“Really intense management and close observation is something not everybody finds easy,” Martens said. “The best conventional farmers, when they switch to organic become the best organic farmers. They apply those well-developed management skills in an organic system.”
Martens believes that organic farms thrive when they manage their system “more biologically,” relying less on purchased inputs. He said Seneca Grain & Bean could produce greater yields by leading with sustainable management, but that the farm is able to profit more by using much less organic nitrate input.
“We could easily average 200 bushels of wheat, but we have a higher net margin when we run about 170 bushels,” Martens said, explaining his calculus to maximize yield while minimizing input through strategic management of his fields. While other grain farms average $600 an acre, Martens’ farm brings in about $1000.
Though the transition to cover-cropping offers cost-saving potential for conventional and organic farms alike, the process of pivoting away from synthetics entails short-term sacrifices that farmers often can not afford. Organic transitions require three years of pesticide-free farming before farms can certify organic and reap the consequent price premiums. Even without transitioning to organic, cover cropping also requires rotation, meaning that farmers must cover after every cash crop.
“It comes down to ‘How long can you put aside a field without cash cropping it?’” Kimball said.
The Policy
Farmers have long fought for subsidies for such sustainable transitions, a now decades-long political battle in the farm industry. In 1990, the Organic Foods Production Act created the National Organic Program, which sets certification standards for organic farms, without any money to fund transitions. The 2008 Farm Bill’s funding for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) led to some of the first transitional funding, by way of cover crop incentives. The $300 million Organic Transition Initiative launched by the USDA in 2022 spells promise, but pales in comparison to the tens of billions in conventional farm subsidies allotted to mostly conventional cash-crop farms, including through crop insurance.
“It was a major political fight to get the crop insurance companies to just allow us to use cover crops without lowering our coverage or denying payments,“ said Martens. Crop insurance is a major subsidy source for farmers, and the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) sets conditions for the eligibility of cover cropping practices. Insurance coverage for cover crops was fairly nebulous until the 2018 Farm Bill, which established a section under the Good Farming Practice Determination Standards Handbook and made guidelines easier to follow.
According to a 2025 report by the Global Agricultural Productivity Initiative at Virginia Tech, “economic concerns remain the dominant barrier to sustained [organic] adoption, including the short-term costs of seed and labor, worries about potential yield reductions, and lower perceived net returns during the transition phase.”
While the USDA has seen promising outcomes with EQIP, the program can only be truly effective at scale, or “landscape-level,” with more funding. The report’s analysis, “suggests that approximately $1 billion in dedicated cover crop funding would be needed to bring 10% of eligible acres (28.5 million acres) into production.” This year’s proposed Senate farm bill cut EQIP’s funding by $1.9 billion to fund other forest and state conservation programs.
“Economic concerns remain the dominant barrier to sustained [organic] adoption, including ... worries about potential yield reductions, and lower perceived net returns during the transition phase.”
Martens worries that organic farmers face an uphill battle against powerful agribusiness interests. “If I’m Monsanto or Bayer, I’m gonna want to sell more Roundup, I want to sell Roundup Ready seeds, and I want my farmers to be able to pay their bills,” Martens said. “Hence the subsidies are coming right to me.“
Still, President Trump’s tariffs may play a role in expanding the organics market. Just five percent of organic goods are imported, while more than a third of conventional produce is imported. While the president received overwhelming support from farmers in each of his elections, the Iran War may give farmers pause.
Gladstone, who has been critical of Trump in the past, said he is closely watching neighboring fertilizer-reliant corn and soybean farms that have been suffering for a few years now, including from the 2025 drought, and are beginning to suffer even more as a result of Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran.
“To put it mildly, hopefully these farmers reach a political breaking point before they reach a financial breaking point. That’s the most diplomatic way I can put it.”
