Even before the war in Ukraine, farmers across the U.S. were getting ready for higher prices on seed, fertilizer and crop chemicals. All winter, major farm media was warning farmers to book supplies early as prices would be high and supplies would be short.

The war has only amped up the concern among farmers and input suppliers. Like the oil companies that cited the sanctions on Russian oil to justify steep price increases (even though Russian oil continues to flow almost without interruption), corporate agribusiness has used the war as a justification to ramp up fertilizer, seed and chemical prices even further, leading Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to ask the Justice Department to investigate whether “every penny of these increases” is warranted. Meanwhile, the farm media offers suggestions for how farmers, despite relatively higher crop prices, might deal with the increase in input costs: Use less, get your old tillage equipment out or, heaven forbid, consider manually pulling weeds like farmers used to do (of course, years ago, farmers didn’t run thousands of acres).

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