The rain in Windsor, North Carolina, is way behind schedule. Despite the seat of Bertie County being crisscrossed with rivers and creeks and lying on the estuary of the Albemarle Sound, local farmer Charles Harden reckons the area is suffering from a 12-inch rain shortfall in the first five months of 2026.

“It’s been terrible dry,” Harden told Salon. Windsor usually gets about 50 inches of rain a year. That’s bad news for his company, Clovergrass Produce, and its crop of soybeans, cucumbers, peanuts and corn plus his herd of beef cattle. “We’re starting off this year in a drought,” Harden said. “We ended last year in a drought.”

“Right now is harder than any time in the history of our country for agriculture,” Harden said. He should have some idea of hard times — Harden is a ninth-generation North Carolinian farmer, his family having been in Bertie County since 1771.

“We’ve been through a Revolutionary War, a Civil War, two world wars, and two depressions,” Harden said. “So we’ve seen it all.”

Things were already difficult for independent producers like the Harden family, who had to weather the whims of corporate farming operations and distributors. The previous year had seen farmers across the nation struggle to keep their heads above water in the wake of President Donald Trump’s tariff policies and subsequent agricultural trade war with China. A subsequent $12 billion relief package from the Trump administration helped avert total disaster.

Then, Trump joined Israel in war against Iran, causing trade through the Strait of Hormuz to come to a screeching halt. Prices of everything from plastics and helium to fertilizer products have skyrocketed. About half of the world’s agricultural nitrogen-based urea fertilizer supply passes through the strait, along with 30% of global ammonia exports.

The price of chemicals necessary to produce fertilizer — phosphorus, nitrogen and ammonia, among others — has risen sharply since the start of the war, putting even more pressure on the nation’s small and independent farmers and producers. When the Iran war began, fertilizer prices jumped from around $400 per ton in early February to nearly $600 per ton in early March. It’s only risen since then.

This would be a problem in any other year, but this year is especially bad. Coming off of 2025, market volatility saw farmers across the country hesitant to buy their year’s fertilizer early, opting instead to buy it closer to the start of the spring growing season. What had been an expensive fertilizer became unaffordable for many, even after accounting for the Trump administration’s bailout to farmers.

“Everybody gets it and immediately pays creditors, whether it be on the input side or the banks,” Harden explained. “That’s what everybody’s doing, because they have to … We’re all trying to figure out these ways to pay people back when we’re not making money.”

“You can give us all the money you want,” he said. “It’s not going to direct back into an independent market to create domestic revenue.”

An April report from the American Farm Bureau Federation found that 70% of the nation’s farmers cannot afford the fertilizer needed to operate another year. The problem is especially acute in the Southeastern U.S., where just 19% of farmers and producers pre-booked their fertilizer shipments prior to the Iran war. As such, a whopping 78% report being unable to afford all the fertilizer they need.

Mitt Walker, director of national affairs at the Alabama Farmers Federation, says the region’s farmers are under “significant strain.”

“Many producers are being forced to make difficult decisions about input use, crop selection, and long‑term investment, which may ultimately affect yields, profitability and farm viability,” he said in a statement to Salon.

Mike McCormick, president of the Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation, is grateful for what help the Trump administration can provide, but stressed that farmers in Mississippi “need relief.”

“At the end of the day, farmers simply want to raise a crop and sell it and earn enough to support their family and cover their bottom line,” McCormick said in a statement to Salon, calling the situation for farmers “very difficult.”

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Josh Linville, vice president of fertilizer at financial services company Stone X, said farmers are “stuck in a real bad situation.”

“When you look at the fertilizer situation, we’ve never seen anything nearly as bad as what we are today,” Linville told Salon, noting that the war in Iran has made the fertilizer situation even worse. China, which supplies 10% of the world’s fertilizer exports, clamped down on its exports in February and tightened them further in April, contributing to the rising costs. Linville thinks China might not reverse the ban until August 2026, well after the bulk of the planting season.

In the meantime, Linville proposes short-term federal payments to farmers to help them survive the year, though he is “not a big fan” of the practice.

“Unfortunately, this entire situation is not the farmer’s fault,” he said. “So, because this is a government-driven situation, and the American farmer is being impacted more than most other industries out there, it justifies a payment.”

For its part, the Trump administration is looking for ways to lower fertilizer costs. When asked for comment, the Department of Agriculture pointed Salon to a recent op-ed from Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins.

“The Trump administration has already taken bold actions to make fertilizer more affordable and accessible for our farmers in the short-term,” Rollins wrote, noting Trump’s 150-day suspension of the Jones Act, which would allow fertilizer to move through the U.S. with more flexibility.

Along with this, Rollins celebrated Trump for “urging” fertilizer companies to prioritize American buyers and allow farmers to lock in fertilizer prices through 2028.

“At the same time, we are also working to rebuild domestic production capacity in the long-term,” she wrote. “Several ongoing projects are expected to reach major construction benchmarks in the coming year, and early estimates suggest these facilities will supercharge our domestic production capacity as they begin operation,” though clarified that the benefits would not appear “overnight.”

Linville called it a “multi-year process,” even if regulations are removed to speed up the buildup of a domestic stockpile. Indeed, one industry report states that a single fertilizer-producing facility takes three to four years to build and fill to capacity, noting that a new ammonia plant in Louisiana began construction in 2025, with full operation expected in 2029.

Moreover, he thinks Rollins’ goal of increasing nitrogen production by 30% would not go to farmers but to existing “industrial demands” and other energy initiatives, such as fuel for shipping vessels. Linville has a different idea: increase competition in fertilizer providers.

“If we can provide some sort of financing package for a new company to build a new nitrogen production facility, not only do you increase supply, you also increase competition,” he said. “It’s a win-win for the farmer.”

As it stands, the fertilizer market is small, with North American companies like Nutrien, Mosaic, and CF Industries accounting for more than $50 billion in global market cap space. The U.S. itself produces 53 million tons of fertilizer.

“The market’s not working the way it should. … These major producers have really worked to restrict and limit access to any competitors to get into the market,” Sarah Carden, the research and policy director at Farm Action, told Salon.

The federal government has had concerns about the lack of market competition for years. Recently, the Department of Justice announced it was investigating whether fertilizer companies in the U.S. have engaged in years of price-fixing. A separate lawsuit in Colorado accuses some of the biggest domestic producers of the same charge.

Back in Windsor, North Carolina, Harden says there is virtually no competition. “They just can’t compete, and it’s really affecting us,” he said of local fertilizer producers, often subject to buyouts. “We had a company that had been here since 1939 that specialized in fertilizer, and they’re gone.”

The USDA has also suggested that farmers switch to less nitrogen-intensive crops, like soybeans, and to cut back on their fertilizer usage. Carden, who runs an organic vegetable farm, said that kind of switch isn’t so easy. “A lot of operations aren’t that nimble,” she said. “If you reduce your application rates, you’re going to look at yield losses. So, it’s a really challenging calculus on that front.”

Carden, like just about every farmer in the nation, is dealing with yet another financial burden from the Iran war in the form of skyrocketing diesel fuel prices.

“Our freight expenses are really bad right now. So, all of our shipping costs, and then diesel, have hit us really hard,” she said.

Diesel costs have risen by 54.4% nationwide since the start of the Iran war, according to a real-time fuel cost tracker from Brown University, which calculated the average cost of a gallon of diesel on May 14 at $5.67. Across many counties of the fertilizer-strapped southeast, diesel fuel costs have risen by more than 50%. In response, Trump has called for ending the federal gas tax to lower costs for Americans, though at the cost of cutting federal highway funds by billions of dollars.

Like Linville, Carden does not see many short-term fixes. Carden doesn’t want taxpayers on the hook for billions more in relief payments, so she proposes using the Defense Production Act as a solution.

Last used during the COVID-19 pandemic, invoking the act would make the chemicals necessary for fertilizer a national defense priority. Doing so would “give the federal government more authority to monitor supply, prevent hoarding and help stabilize the market,” according to Carden.

Still, farmers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. If food costs go up, consumers spend less. “Our customers are just not willing to absorb any price increases,” Carden said.

However, if fertilizer costs remain high, farmers risk spending more money putting chemicals into the ground than they’ll get for what comes out of it.

“This isn’t a one-to-one ratio,” Carden explains, “but if you’re a farmer and you’re looking at this, you don’t see a lot of hope looking forward.”

Charles Harden puts little faith in the Trump administration, accusing it of speaking only with “corporate farmers” and calling the president “narrow-minded.”

“They don’t want these real farmers there, like me, because we’re going to tell them the truth, and they don’t want to hear the truth,” he said. “They’ve shown me no clear path forward. I see none.”

For him, the stresses he faces are “enormous,” with 2026 gearing up to be worse than 2025. He says he “can’t shut down” when he goes home at night, worried about paying his mounting bills, and says the constant physical and mental strain has taken years off his body.

Last year, Harden and his wife welcomed their second child, a son, into the family. His son spent time in the NICU and was soon diagnosed with a severe genetic disorder that causes cerebral palsy. His son’s medical expenses are never far from Harden’s mind, along with an ever-growing laundry list of concerns.

“I’m sitting here thinking, how am I gonna pay for my son?” he asks.

“I don’t even know if I can go buy groceries at the end of the year,” he said. “We shouldn’t have to live like that. You know, none of us is asking to be rich. We’re just asking to make a living.”