Fertilizers supply nutrients that help crops grow. This tool compares prices for five fertilizer materials over time. It helps explain changes in one part of farming costs, not the whole cost of growing food.
Crops need nutrients. Farmers buy products that supply them, and the price of those products is one part of growing food.
Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium help plants grow.
Urea, DAP, TSP and potash carry different nutrients.
Farmers choose products for their soil and plants.
Fertilizer matters, but it is not the whole food price.
Plants need nutrients, including nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. This page shows monthly reference prices for materials used to supply them. Each product has a different mix of nutrients, so the products are not interchangeable.
A metric tonne is 1,000 kg of product, not 1,000 kg of pure nutrient.
If a fertilizer’s example price rises from $400 to $500 per tonne, it rose 25%. Its index would move from 100 to 125. That does not mean a farmer’s total costs rose 25%: farms also pay for seeds, fuel, labour and other supplies.
Monthly values are matched by date.
Preparing stored observations…
These summary numbers describe the dates shown in the chart. They tell you what happened in the past; they do not predict what happens next.
The table makes exact values easier to check. A CSV download is a simple table file that opens in most spreadsheet programs.
Natural gas is the main feedstock for nitrogen fertilisers such as urea, so compare this workspace with the US natural gas price and the global energy cost translator.
Each series is a US dollar price for one metric tonne of the material itself. A tonne of urea and a tonne of potash contain different nutrients, so compare their movement, not their price level.
Urea is made from ammonia, and most ammonia is made from natural gas. Phosphate and potash depend more on mining. That is why urea and gas prices can move more closely together than potash and gas.
“Latest” is the last value in the displayed range, not necessarily today’s. For CAGR, volatility, drawdown and correlation, see the full guide to reading the workbench results.
Urea supplies nitrogen. DAP means diammonium phosphate and supplies nitrogen and phosphorus. TSP means triple superphosphate and supplies phosphorus. Potash here means potassium chloride, a source of potassium. Phosphate rock is a raw material used to make phosphate fertilizers. A cheaper tonne is not automatically a cheaper source of the nutrient a crop needs.
A CSV file is a table you can open in a spreadsheet. The download links give you the stored source observations, while the on-page table shows the latest values after your chosen changes, such as indexing or currency conversion. They may therefore show different numbers. Keep the dates, units and source names with any figures you reuse.
About the examples: Round numbers in these explanations are for learning. They are not current market quotes or predictions. “Not enough data” means a statistic cannot be calculated from the available observations.
These links lead to the organisations or methods behind the numbers. New figures appear here after they are published and added to this site. A missing value means data is unavailable, not that the price or supply is zero.
