Read Full Transcript
[00:00:00] Mike Howell: The dirt with me, Mike Howell, an economics podcast where I present the down and dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by economics.com farming’s go-to informational resource. I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research use, and issues helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
Well, hello again everyone. Welcome back to the Dirt. A little bit different type of episode we’re having today. We’re not gonna be talking primarily about agronomy and soil fertility today, but we have an organization that works heavily with our fertilizer industry, and we wanted to give them a few minutes to talk about what they do.
To help us do that, we have Mr. Corey Rosen Bush with us today. Corey, welcome to the dirt, and tell us a little bit about the Fertilizer Institute. Introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us what you do there.
[00:01:04] Corey Rosenbusch: Great. Thanks, Mike for having me. I can talk soil fertility, but your listeners will quickly realize how ignorant I am.
I’m not an agronomist. I tell people all the time. I’m a lowly ag ed major from Texas a and m. I’m not sure what qualifications that gives me, but really excited to talk about TFI and. The policy work and some of the industry initiatives we have going on. I just celebrated my fifth year here, believe it or not.
Uh, time goes really fast when you’re having fun or perhaps facing a crisis every six months it feels like, at least. Uh, prior to TFI I was at a different trade association that represented the cult storage industry. There is an association for everything, but all of your perishable food products would flow through those facilities and then.
Before that I did International Agricultural Development, grew up in a small town called Glenrose, Texas, population 1500 where my dad taught ag and was the FFA advisor for over 35 years.
[00:01:59] Mike Howell: Sounds great. Corey, I believe the last time we were face-to-face meeting, you talked about your experience in FFA and showing livestock, and that’s something that we had in common.
Some great memories back in those days.
[00:02:11] Corey Rosenbusch: I say that every lesson I learned. That I use at work today came from showing pigs growing up. There’s a lot of life lessons you get from feeding and shoveling manure and running hogs around the livestock shows. No question.
[00:02:24] Mike Howell: There definitely is. Cory, we could spend a whole episode talking about that, but that’s not what we wanted to talk about today.
Let’s talk a little bit about TFI and I guess to start off, who is TFI.
[00:02:34] Corey Rosenbusch: We are the Fertilizer Institute. We represent the entire fertilizer industry as your trade association. Our members will arrange anywhere from manufacturers such as a Nutrien, mosaic, cf, Yara Coke, to distributors, importers, and at retailers.
Right now, our chair of the TFI Board is Mark Orr. He’s the president and CEO of Growmark. So we truly do have representation from the entire fertilizer industry, supply chain. Our primary focus is on advocacy, both in Washington DC, but also at the state levels and in communities as well. We help listen and understand what are the issues that are impacting your business member company’s business, and make sure that our voice is represented.
[00:03:17] Mike Howell: Corey, you mentioned that you’re representing us on the issues that are facing us these days. Talk a little bit about some of the issues that TFI is working on.
[00:03:24] Corey Rosenbusch: Well, there’s no shortage. We recently finished the TFI annual meeting, and at that meeting we had a board meeting, and the primary focus of the board is to set a policy agenda for the new congress and the new administration.
We wake up every morning and wonder what the issue of the day is going to be. It’s a moving target. I’d say right now that’s all related to trade and tariffs. The hot topic seems to be the Canadian tariffs, especially because of how important Canadian fertilizer is for the US grower, we import about 87% of our potash from Canada, as an example, and just going into spring planting season.
That’s a huge area of concern, but there are other issues as well that of course, we’re focused on as a matter of fact. Chris Reynolds, who is Nutrients chief Commercial Officer, was on stage with us at our annual meeting recently, and this was the topic, what are the issues that you’re most concerned about as a business?
So some of those included getting a farm bill passed, making sure farmers have that base reference price right, and safety nets in place. We know how important that is for the grower. We talk a lot about. Regulatory certainty. The amount of capital that goes into operating our businesses, whether those are distribution facilities or manufacturing facilities, can be billions of dollars, and to make capital investments can’t be a two year basis on which Congress is elected or even a four year basis on which a president is elected.
These are multi-decade capital investments that are a great example of something that we’re following very closely with the new administration is. Some of the 45 section tax incentives that came through the Inflation Reduction Act. And of course, president Trump is looking at that inflation reduction act very closely.
But some of those 45 tax credits are really important for agriculture and for our members. 45 Q for example, which incentivizes. Carbon sequestration drives a lot of the low carbon ammonia conversation and decisions that nitrogen producers are making around putting low carbon ammonia technology either into existing plants or building new facilities.
I’d say another area is innovation and biologicals and some of the biostimulants that are really hot on the market right now. How do they get regulated? What does labeling look like? What are the standards that exists around that? We also talked a lot about phospho gypsum reuse, which is a little bit peculiar, but for every ton of phosphate you produce, you get five tons of phospho gypsum, which the EPA does not allow us to reuse.
We have to put it in these gigantic stacks. If you ever go to Orlando, maybe for a vacation, and you look off in the distance. Those aren’t mountains. Florida does not have mountains. Those are actually phospho gypsum stacks. The list goes on and on. I would say underscoring everything is really a sound energy policy to make sure we have affordable and accessible natural gas, which is of course the feedstock for all nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers.
I could keep going down the list, but those were probably the big ones that really get prioritized. I should add transportation there as well. The river system is so important to farmers. Both for marketing their grain, but also for, we don’t like to say fertilizer gets backhauled. We like to think of us as being the primary target, but that river system is important for getting nutrients to the growers.
[00:06:30] Mike Howell: That’s exactly right. We’ve done episodes about the importance of the river in the past. Corey, one issue that you mentioned that’s on the forefront of everybody’s mind these days is the tariffs. The tariffs were due to take place and then they. Pulled back and we really don’t know exactly what’s going on with the tariffs anymore.
Talk a little bit about the situation with the tariffs and what effects that could have with the fertilizer industry, and there’s a thing called the phosphate counter bailiff duty. Talk about the similarities and differences between a tariff and that and what people need to know and understand about those.
[00:07:01] Corey Rosenbusch: Well, Mike, I wake up in DC every morning. I’m not sure I know what’s going on. So it’s a constantly moving target. And when your listeners are hearing this, I’m not sure where we will be on this particular issue, but obviously, um, tariffs are important tool that the president will use. I think we are concerned as an industry particularly about the Canadian tariffs because of how dependent we are on Canada for some of our crop nutrients.
God just did not put potash in the United States. Saskatchewan, that’s the heart of the industry. And so we have to import over 95% of the potash that a grower uses into the United States, and 87% of that comes from Canada. If that Canadian potash were not available, the next two largest suppliers would be Belarus and Russia.
And you already know the complications that exist around some of those trading partners. Although I will say, just to go back to those complications we had a couple of years ago, fertilizer was exempt from sanctions here in the us so we continue to bring Russian fertilizers in. We were already in a difficult ag economy with a lot of fluctuation in the fertilizer markets, and if we had put any kind of a, a restriction on, on Russian fertilizer, it would’ve been a real pain point.
Maybe I could just share a little bit about what we’re hearing out of the White House anecdotally as we’ve engaged with them. And I think we have to remember, it’s still very young in this administration that a lot of the people there are still very new we’ve done. I. Three White House visits already.
And three questions that I thought were really interesting and good questions by the way, but hopefully this will give your listeners a little bit of sense of how we, as a fertilizer supply chain might be different than oil and gas or cars or aluminum. The first question was, well, what is our strategic reserves of potash look like in the us?
And we’re not the oil and gas industry. We don’t have. Strategic oil reserves like they do distributors that I’ve been talking to anywhere from 60 to 80% of our potash is in place for spring. That’s how just in time that supply chain really is. Of course, after the relief that we got the temporary reprieve from tariffs, I’m sure everybody’s moving really quickly to make sure that everything gets in place.
The second question that was asked is, well, where are all of the potash manufacturing sites in the us? That take the potash and process it into fertilizer. It’s not a raw material. You’re not bringing in components like you would for a car or aluminum. It is the final product. We are mining that potash and that is the fertilizer then that gets put on the ground.
So there are no manufacturing sites in the us. The last question, and I’m excited that we have a Secretary of Agriculture and we can talk more about her later, that I believe is going to be a tremendous advocate for agriculture and farming because the last question that we got was, well, can’t growers just wait until July to put the fertilizer down?
Once we’ve kind of sorted through all of this, you and I chuckle at that. But for someone that doesn’t understand agriculture, they don’t know that the timing, the window that Mother Nature gives us is different than any other industry out there. It’s a constant education process. I will say the other comment that we heard when we walked in, ’cause we issued a lot of press releases around the tariffs when they originally announced were that they had read our press statement in which you take a deep cult because you wonder what’s coming next.
And they said, we appreciate the recognition. That the administration has some larger policy goals they’re trying to achieve. So this is a balancing act with this administration. You have to be really careful about what you say. We can advocate to ensure that we have fair and free trade while also giving the administration credit where credit is due.
I think the big question mark that everyone has is what will the administration’s view be? Towards farmers. We all know that they were a core voting block. They were the ones that got Trump elected. And if we do see tariffs go into place that would be harmful to farmers in agriculture, will he exempt them?
Will we see some sort of a payout maybe like he did when the Chinese tariff, the China trade wars happened in his last administration? And I think those are the real question marks. I will say this growers that I’ve talked to, they’re very loyal and right now this is not. You Lee on their radar. We had a call a couple weeks ago with the Ag associations, the grower groups, and they all just said, this is not something we’re hearing a lot about right now.
When the rubber meets the road, perhaps later, what will that reaction look like and what will their voice be in all of this? Because they’re really the most important voice when it comes to this administration. To your second point about countervailing duties, it’s funny because we have to educate policy makers all the time.
Fertilizer is not the product. There are dozens of different fertilizer products. You can’t just put them all into one big category called fertilizer. And tariffs are the same way. Uh, tariff isn’t a tariff isn’t a tariff. They’re all very different. And countervailing duties are placed on products via a process that is run by the International Trade Commission.
They’re a completely independent body from the administration. The president’s powers don’t really impact their decisions other than he can appoint commissioners when those vacancies exist. Otherwise, they have complete authority. They hear about the ITC working with Department of Commerce to collect and calculate duties.
That’s just a very automated process. It’s not something that the administration or executive branch can get involved in. You really have to think about it more as a. Kind of a court system, a judiciary process more than anything. It’s not as if a new president could come in and overturn those, ’cause those are controlled by the ITC.
Very different tariff.
[00:12:36] Mike Howell: Well, we appreciate you working through that and talking about those differences. Another thing you mentioned earlier was you had been to your annual meeting a few weeks ago, and I know y’all have different events going on throughout the year. Talk about some of the other events that TFI host each year.
[00:12:50] Corey Rosenbusch: We have an agronomy conference that is done in the summer. We do that in August. That’s really geared towards retail agronomy. We also have some very sophisticated growers that’ll come as well. We will really focus the content around for our nutrient stewardship. We also have exhibitors that are there.
We also wanna use that as a platform for agronomists to help get educated around some of these new products and innovations that we have. For example, we recently released a standard for bio stimulants. I think this is gonna be an interesting tool in a lot of growers tool belts, but it gets the label of being snake oil.
What is it? How does it work? And so that standard of what defines a bio stimulant was released and then we started a certification. So the hope would be, as a retailer is looking at these products, they’ll look for that seal of approval, that certification, to know that it meets a baseline standard.
They’re still gonna have to do trial tests because they’re so. Influenced by soil type and crops and the weather that you’ll still have to go through that step in the process. We also do a market and logistics conference that we host in the fall where we look at the market outlook for NPK Sulfur Natural Gas.
I cover a lot of transportation logistics. Topics around trucking, the river system, Marine rail is a big area that we focus on as well. So yes, those are other events in addition to the two, what I would call buy sales events where commercial conversations are happening at our annual meeting in the TFI World Fertilizer Conference.
[00:14:16] Mike Howell: Cory, you mentioned the four R advocacy program and the four Rs is something we have spent a lot of time talking about here on the program over the last three years. Talk a little bit more about the four R advocacy program and what’s involved in that.
[00:14:28] Corey Rosenbusch: Each year, we select growers that are really exemplifying good stewardship practices using the four Rs, applying fertilizer at the right source rate, time, and place.
An ag retailer can nominate a grower, and then when we go through the selection process. We will then select those growers that we bring to the agronomy conference last year was in St. Louis. This year it’ll be in Indianapolis, but grab those dates in August and come and join us where we’ll highlight those growers and what those practices are.
The original vision behind the program was that growers influenced their neighbors the most. If they’re doing good for our work, for our practices, that other neighbors or growers would use that as well. We have found that they are probably our. Best lobbying tool, bring them here to Washington, DC which we started this year.
We took ’em on Capitol Hill. We walked into a congressional office that had been very skeptical of ag retail, the fertilizer industry. This was coming off a time where we saw the volatility in the marketplace that created a lot of concern for growers and having a farmer stand up in front of that member of Congress and tell their story and that they’re not gonna be wasting fertilizer, that they’re gonna utilize it.
Efficiently that they depend upon the land, that they work very closely with their retail agronomist to plan for those fertilizer needs. Boy, that is so much more valuable than me saying, and they do a terrific job with telling that story. So I would invite any of your listeners that are doing innovative things around four Rs to apply and that application process is open now on a rolling basis and it’s great for the, the growers as well.
Like I said, we changed it up this year. We used to send them the retail agronomist and their grower partner to Commodity Classic where they would sit in a booth all week and they really enjoyed that. That was a lot of fun, and they’re like, well man, we really hate, we’re not getting to do that this year.
So when we brought ’em to DC, we got them a tour of the White House. They got to do a private tour and into some non-public areas of the capital. Afterwards they just said, wow, that was even better than anything we could do at Commodity Classic. It’s a great experience for those growers as well.
[00:16:31] Mike Howell: You mentioned some of the other programs you talked about the Bio Stimulant certification and we just talked about the our advocacy program.
Talk a little bit about the verified Ammonia Carbon Intensity certification.
[00:16:41] Corey Rosenbusch: So I referenced earlier the Inflation Reduction Act, and I think the tax credits, the 45 Q tax credits, n VTax credits that were included in that piece of legislation really drove a conversation I think at one point. We counted 16 different projects that got announced related to producing low carbon ammonia.
Now, how many of those will actually come to fruition? I could probably count on one hand, at least right now. It did generate a lot of discussion or it allowed some of these projects to pencil out. At the same time, you have food companies that are going to their partners and saying, we will pay a premium to a grower that can prove that they’re producing whatever those ingredients are with a lower carbon intensity score.
As our part in that process, we really started to define a standard around what is low carbon ammonia. And we were using blue, green, gray, pink, brown terminology. But blue is not. Blue is not blue. And so how do we define what that is? And so we built a standard around it. We define what it meant. We actually completely got rid of the color scheme.
I. And instead we can give those ammonia production plants a carbon intensity score. And so the hope would be that if someone is incentivized to buy a lower carbon ammonia, they will be able to look and see what the carbon intensity score is for. That urea or that ammonia that they’re using, and hopefully include that in any of their own commercial activity.
We had five nitrogen plants, five ammonia plants that have already gone through the pilot phases of scoring the carbon intensity of that ammonia. And we’ll be certified soon and we’ll be opening up for other production sites as well.
[00:18:23] Mike Howell: Great deal. Corey. I wanted to back up a little bit. You talked about working with lawmakers on policy, and I know one thing that was front and center a good bit.
Last year there was a push to try to get some of our fertilizer materials put on the critical minerals list. Not sure where that ever ended up. Can you talk a little bit about that and where we stand on that?
[00:18:41] Corey Rosenbusch: Yeah, so we had that included in the farm bill language and it was going to be. Part of USG S’S role to reconsider adding potash and phosphate onto that critical minerals list.
So some might ask, well, what does that do? It provides a streamlined process whereby permits can be acquired for those production sites. We had a phosphate mine that recently went through this process. It took 10 years and $30 million for one phosphate mine, probably closer to six, seven years on average for a mine to get permitted.
But it’s expensive. It takes a long time. Again, when we were going through some of the market volatility a couple years ago, I remember members a Congress saying, well, can we just increase our production capacity at these plants in the lag time? To get these mines permitted and to get a production plant permitted is really long.
And so you can’t just quickly turn it on and off like perhaps some may think. So that’s why we want to get it on the Critical minerals list. Ironically, the reason, at least from a potash standpoint, that USGS has told us they don’t want it included is because, and yes, this is humorous Potash primarily comes from Canada.
And there aren’t really a lot of risk involved in disrupting that supply chain. It’s funny that we’re talking about that because Well, yeah, you can see with a tariff conversation there actually is, and we would argue that some of the rail strikes that we saw in the past couple of years also add to some of that supply chain disruption.
[00:20:09] Mike Howell: We don’t need any hiccups in our supply chain on our fertilizer. Corey, you’ve mentioned the farm bill a couple of times, and this is the last question I have for you Everywhere I go, people are always asking, when are we going to get a new farm bill? Is the farm bill gonna happen this year? Any insights on the farm bill?
I can tell you hot off
[00:20:26] Corey Rosenbusch: the press, less than two hours ago, I was standing next to chair GT Thompson, who chairs the House Ag Committee and he confidently said, we will have a very good farm bill quickly this year. And he was extremely optimistic with. Both the House and the Senate under Republican control, a good partner.
He mentioned Senator Bozeman in the Senate and a strong Secretary of Ag and Brooke Rollins, that we will not only have a farm bill, but it will be a farm bill that farmers will especially be very proud of. I take Chairman Thompson for his work and I think they’re hard at work. To make that a reality, and we believe that some of the provisions around conservation programs, critical minerals, there’s bio stimulant recognition in the Farm Bill to make sure it doesn’t get regulated as a pesticide at EPA.
We don’t want fifra touching our biostimulants. We’ll all be included in that farm bill.
[00:21:20] Mike Howell: Well, Corey, we really appreciate you taking a few minutes to visit with us today. I know things are moving fast and furious there in DC these days. No telling how much you’ve missed just in the 30 minutes we’ve been talking today.
Is there anything else you wanna leave our listeners with before we let you go today?
[00:21:34] Corey Rosenbusch: I would just say that we’ve got a great industry at a great time and coming off of our annual meeting recently, there was a lot of optimism out there. Even though the farm economy is not in a great. Place right now. I think there is a recognition that it’s the American farmer that’s gonna feed the world, and it takes all of us, not just from a policy perspective that empowers manufacturers and growers to do their job growers, retailers, agronomists, manufacturers, all working together and pulling and rowing in the same direction.
I’m looking forward to what the next few years hold.
[00:22:05] Mike Howell: Cory, thanks again for joining us today. Listeners, we appreciate you tuning in today. If you will, stick around for just a couple of minutes and we’ll be right back with segment two. Farming isn’t farming without questions, and now there’s a place to go for answers.
At economics, an entire team of agronomists is waiting and ready to help for free. No question is too big or too small. Visit Nutrien Economics with a k.com at submit your question with the ask an agronomist feature.
Well, listeners, welcome back for Segment two. As you know, this is a segment where we ask our agronomist a question of the week. We have Dr. Alan Blaylock, a senior agronomist with Nutrien back with us today. Alan, welcome back to the show.
[00:22:49] Alan Blaylock: Thanks, Mike. I’m enjoying this series on Ask The Agronomist. I think it’s kind of fun to get into some of these questions.
[00:22:55] Mike Howell: Well, Alan, we’ve had a couple of questions already this season about Volatilization and what it is and how it works, how we can manage Volatilization. Today’s question kind of follows that same theme, Alan, what can we do to provide. Prevent this Volatilization loss. As a producer, what steps can be taken?
[00:23:11] Alan Blaylock: Well, generally, Mike, our first choice if we can is to get the urea into the ground. So you wanna watch the weather forecast. If you’re not going to do any mechanical incorporation, you need to be applying the urea right before there’s a very significant probability, a high probability of getting a significant rainfall event, or the ability to irrigate from overhead sprinklers and push it into the soil Now.
The amount of irrigation or rainfall that we need, we would say would be at least a half an inch, preferably more. ’cause the deeper we can get it, the better. So that’s gonna depend a little bit on your soil texture and things like that. But anyway, we wanna get it on ahead of some kind of incorporating event.
Either mechanical tillage, something like that, or rainfall enough to move it several inches into the soil Now. A little bit of rainfall is not good. A lot of rainfall or some significant rainfall would be better, and we really wanna get it in at least a couple inches because as you know, gases diffuse in and out of the soil.
And if the urea is stay in that top inch, we can still have loss from the soil. As the ammonia’s evolved, it can escape from the soil. So anyway, getting it in incorporated. That’s kind of the option of choice if we can, if we don’t have that opportunity. There are additives we can use on the urea. We call them urease inhibitors.
They’re called that because the enzyme that facilitates the conversion of urea to ammonia or ammonium is called the urease enzyme. It’s an enzyme that’s everywhere in nature. It’s in plant materials, it’s on the soil. It’s virtually everywhere. So the enzyme itself is not limiting. So we can put on a urease inhibitor that will temporarily slow down that hydrolysis process of the urea.
It’s a chemical inhibitor. It blocks the active site on the enzyme that the urea molecule would fit into, and that just slows the process down. We don’t wanna stop it. Because the urea has to convert to become plan available. So we don’t wanna shut it down completely, but we buy ourselves a little time, typically around 10 to 14 days, to slow that process down, allow it to be completed.
Then the urea is transformed into ammonium where it’ll be stable. I.
[00:25:13] Mike Howell: Alan, that’s a great description and great justification. What needs to be done to protect this nitrogen from being lost? There is one form of protection that you didn’t mention, and it really surprises me that you left this one out.
What about our controlled release fertilizer products?
[00:25:27] Alan Blaylock: Yeah, my control release fertilizer is very effective at stopping volatilization because it’s not doing the same thing as urease inhibitor, but what it’s doing is releasing that urea at a slower rate because we’re reducing the concentration of urea.
On the soil surface, at any point in time, we reduce the effect of that rapid rise in pH. We’re just reducing the concentration and therefore we can virtually eliminate the volatilization loss by using a control release or slow release form because we’re changing the rate of that reaction, which is in large effect what the Rease inhibitor is doing.
It’s changing the rate of the reaction, slowing it down, so using slower control release also has a similar even better effect.
[00:26:12] Mike Howell: Alan, once again, we appreciate you taking time to explain some of these nuances about Volatilization and how to prevent it. Listeners, we appreciate you tuning into this week’s episode.
As always, if you have questions about anything we’ve talked about today, you can visit our website. That’s nutrien dash economics with a k.com. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with the dirt. Hey guys. If you like what you heard today, do us a favor and share this podcast with someone else. It could be your neighbor, your friend, your crop advisor, or whoever you think would enjoy it.
Your support helps ensure future episodes, so please like, subscribe, share, and rate the show wherever you’re listening from.
