Iowa farmers paid a price for the world’s instability this year, and helping the world’s farmers get ahead of the next shock is how we all pay less next time.
By Eric Mitchell, President of the Alliance to End Hunger; and Sarah Tweeten, Iowa farmer and Farm Journal Foundation Farmer Ambassador
This opinion piece was originally published by the Des Moines Register on October 18, 2026. You can find the original posting HERE.
One of us farms 1,800 acres of corn and soybeans near Kensett, Iowa. The other leads a national coalition working to end hunger. This year we reached the same conclusion from opposite ends of the food system: When the world is unstable, farmers pay first.
When the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed in early March, global prices for urea, a common nitrogen fertilizer, rose 80% by April, according to the World Bank. On the Tweeten farm, MAP, a phosphate fertilizer, cost 14.5% more than a year earlier, so on some rented ground Tweeten applied only enough to replace what last year’s crop removed instead of her usual soil-test rates.
Many farmers she knows have scaled back on fertilizer for the past couple of years, hoping prices would come down, and now they have to balance keeping expenses down against keeping enough nutrients in the soil to grow a good crop. Iowa Farmers Union President Aaron Lehman said this summer that some farmers switched crops just to get through.
Farmers around the world are confronting these same challenges. But in places already facing food insecurity, a failed harvest can quickly escalate into a humanitarian crisis and trigger the emergency appeals that American taxpayers help answer.
Emergency food aid saves lives, and American farmers are key to that, but helping farmers before a crisis is paramount. The International Fund for Agricultural Development, the U.N. agency that invests in rural people and small farms, reports that every $1 spent on resilience now saves up to $10 in emergency aid later. Better seed, water, storage and roads to market let a family ride out a bad year, and they give young people a real choice to build a future at home.
Stability abroad pays off here, too. Iowa is one of the nation’s largest agricultural exporters, and the best future customers for Iowa pork, corn and soybeans are countries where farm families can earn a living and economies can grow.
Iowa has understood this for a long time. Norman Borlaug, who grew up in Cresco, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to feed a hungry world, and he founded the World Food Prize. This month, as the World Food Prize marks its 40th anniversary, leaders from around the world gather in Des Moines under the theme “Before Hunger Wins.”
