My first thought from this is that (if my napkin math is right) I'm apparently pissing away a penny a day.
Yeah, unless you’re a growing person, that’s where it all goes (depending on the bioavailability of your protein).
Urea prices
71–80 of 100 posts
Re: Urea prices
#72Incredible how Trump ran on a "no wars" and "lower prices" platform. And that people actually believed it.
To be honest, the Fell for it again award goes to a lot of voters across the world. It has become a routine part of politics. What is fascinating is how confidently repeating almost any claim, over and over, is often enough to make people eventually believe it. "He wouldn’t have lied to us"
Re: Urea prices
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I guess the recent move in urea likely isn’t coming from energy costs, something fertilizer-specific, exports, shipping, or supply One of India's SOEs recently paused Urea production at some plants due to NatGas issues from the ongoing conflict [0]. Additonally, India began reducing purchasing of Russian LNG in late 2025. India also launched a tender to purchase urea on the global market in February [1]. This led t…
[flagged]
What is a WITCH or AFS?
Re: Urea prices
#74So a couple things:
1. if you’re a natgas producing country with lots of farms (hi USA and Canada) , your mega farm is probably injecting ammonia directly into soil as its nitrogen source, not urea. Pdf pg10, labelled pg5: https://www.ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/pub...
80-90% of US nitrogen fertilization is ammonia (because it’s almost entirely nitrogen and the rest are bonded to heavier molecules than hydrogen).
Ammonia prices always have big geographic variations because it’s a pain to ship a hazardous gas versus liquids or solids. https://businessanalytiq.com/procurementanalytics/index/ammo...
And much of it gets applied in the fall, not spring
2. Nitrogen fertilizer varies by crop. Beans crops (soy, kidney beans, chickpeas) fixate their own nitrogen and have zero/minimal applied. Corn and grains, particularly the higher protein varieties need among the most applied.
3. If you like to eat farmed land animals, you’re going to have a bad time from high fertilizer prices. Of traditional edibles: cattle is going to be the worst impacted. Chicken the least. Pork is in the middle. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2022/03/feed-conv...
Re: Urea prices
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's debatable whether biofuels reduce CO2. I think it's better to understand them as subsidies for agriculture.
Could you elaborate?
If you wanted to save CO2 you'd slap solar panels on the fields instead of growing corn or whatever. Plants are rather bad at capturing solar energy and they need fertilizer and pesticides to grow and diesel to be planted and harvested. Then you lose a good part of the energy the plant captured until you have a product that you can burn in an engine.
With solar panels you get like 20x the energy out and you can have a meadow with high biodiversity around the panels. Growing a nice little forest, maybe with a couple of wind turbines in it if the location is windy, would probably also save more CO2.
Re: Urea prices
#76Yes urea is used in fertilizer. Yes, the price is going up relative to May 13, 2024 (lowest in 5 years). look at the chart in the article, then click 5Y on the bottom of the chart. Click the + sign between the calendar and wrench icon Type in "US Food inflation". It will overlay the "urea" price with the "US food inflation". Yes, urea seems to be a leading indicator. It is nothing like in 2022, yet .
One of those is an absolute value (urea $) and one is a rate of change (food price inflation). Maybe I’m being dumb, but why are they tracking almost 1:1, both with linear Y axis? I can compare Urea $ to Crude Oil $ and get an even closer 5 year correlation. Are we actually indexing against something else here? Edit: that is, perhaps urea prices are driven mostly by energy costs, which in turn drives inflation rates.
Yes. Nat gas -> ammonia -> urea. Theres some efficiencies that vary by site but its a hundred year old process of a true commodity. The price per therm _is_ the input.
Was listening to a fertilizer analyst the other day. She thought corn:urea was the better comparison. Nitrogen is the cost of marginal yields. And corn:urea shows the farmer being squeezed between their commodity output price and the required input cost. At some point its just not cost effective to grow corn, so you go soy, and reduced supply should pish up future prices. Oh look! More commodity price inflation pressure!
Re: Urea prices
#77Yes urea is used in fertilizer. Yes, the price is going up relative to May 13, 2024 (lowest in 5 years). look at the chart in the article, then click 5Y on the bottom of the chart. Click the + sign between the calendar and wrench icon Type in "US Food inflation". It will overlay the "urea" price with the "US food inflation". Yes, urea seems to be a leading indicator. It is nothing like in 2022, yet .
> 2022 And that was specifically due to the (ongoing) Russian Invasion of Ukraine. After the 2022 spike, most large countries began building alternative supply chains to reduce impacts from these kinds of hits. For example, the US and Europe largely doesn't use urea unlike Brazil, India, and China. This is also why Asian countries have been investing heavily in Hydrogen energy despite HN's hate boner to the technolog…
The Economist was recently citing hydrogen as "deep tech" [1] (meaning long R&D cycles, sometimes unproven techniology no short term profitability, heavy investment, industry-wide transformative power).
Most of your sources have plans focused on hydrogen production, but I'd be interested to see specific targets or plans regarding specific uses like fertilizers. There are some in the Hydrogen Roadmap Europe, but it seems focused on transportation [2].
[1] - https://www.economist.com/business/2026/03/01/at-last-reason... [2] - https://www.clean-hydrogen.europa.eu/media/publications/hydr...
Re: Urea prices
#78My first thought from this is that (if my napkin math is right) I'm apparently pissing away a penny a day.
Adding to PlunderBunny, the Romans also used urine collected from public toilets to make detergents to whiten clothes.
Re: Urea prices
#79My first thought from this is that (if my napkin math is right) I'm apparently pissing away a penny a day.
There was a time when leather tanners used to collect the urine from bars - I guess the tanners paid for it.
The nitrogen cycle can be short-circuited really easily at scale.
No need to wait for algal blooms to turn into oil.
Its usage in tanning is pretty wasteful in comparison as it was just used for its high pH and presumably thrown away afterwards.
Getting only the urea-rich golden liquid might require some coöperation like back in the day, but it is idiotic to synthesize ammonia from oil without recycling the vast amounts we have in our bladders; a mistake we have been committing for the past 100 years.
Re: Urea prices
#80So a couple things: 1. if you’re a natgas producing country with lots of farms (hi USA and Canada) , your mega farm is probably injecting ammonia directly into soil as its nitrogen source, not urea. Pdf pg10, labelled pg5: https://www.ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/pub... 80-90% of US nitrogen fertilization is ammonia (because it’s almost entirely nitrogen and the rest are bonded to heavier molecules th…
I don't know if I agree with their conclusion on #3, beef is fed 90% alfalfa grass which is literally cheaper than dirt and fixates its own nitrogen. Yeah they eat more feed per pound of meat, but alfalfa is literally the cheapest and easiest crop to grow. Sow it, mow it, bail it, now you have good ground to plant grains in without artificial fertilizer next year. You only feed cows grains during their last month to finish them to increase marbling/fat content.
If you produce less beef, you grow less alfalfa, and you end up using more artificial fertilizer which might even raise grain prices.