Consumers who may experience sticker-shock in grocery stores this summer for bread, meat, vegetables and other essentials should consider the link between food prices and how much farmers are paying for the fertilizer being applied to crop fields, an agriculture technology expert says.
“Discussion of fertilizer use may feel trivial to the average Canadian, but choices made in the field could have a big impact at the grocery store,” University of Guelph researcher Asim Biswas said Monday in a news release.
In some parts of Canada, farmers are paying more than $1,100 per tonne for fertilizer, compared to $750 per tonne at the same time last year.
Experts have attributed the spike to global supply-chain disruptions linked to tariffs and the ongoing U.S.-Israel war with Iran.
Fertilizer costs, along with another major farming input that is also rising — fuel for tractors and other farm equipment — inevitably become passed on to consumers.
“Fertilizer is often the biggest cost for grain producers,” Biswas noted.
Some Thunder Bay-area farming operations may not be hit as hard this spring if they purchased fertilizer in advance last year, before prices began to sky-rocket, noted Tarlok Singh Sahota, director of Lakehead University’s agricultural research station just south of the city.
Biswas said that in general, farmers could soften the blow felt by consumers by exploring ways at becoming more efficient with fertilizer use.
“The goal should not simply be to produce more fertilizer, but to use it smarter,” he said in the news release.
The use of “soil-sensing technology, precision agriculture tools and digital decision-support tools can all help producers use the nutrients in fertilizers more efficiently,” Biswas said.
“This will reduce costs and also improve environmental impacts.”
