Where Does US Fertilizer Come From? Country by Country

Reviewed August 2026 against the USDA Economic Research Service, University of Illinois farmdoc daily, and Investigate Midwest’s analysis of USDA/Census trade data.

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Most of the nitrogen fertilizer used on US farms is either shipped in as finished ammonia from Trinidad and Tobago, Canada and Russia, or made domestically at gas-fed ammonia plants that pull nitrogen straight out of the air. The US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (ERS) puts the imported share at over half of the nitrogen fertilizer used on US farms, and about 80% of the potash — while phosphate runs the other way, with the US producing most of what it uses from Florida and North Carolina rock. Copper’s supply chain is a different story again: it starts as mined ore refined into copper sulfate or copper oxide, topped up by recycled scrap, and it isn’t tracked as a food-security risk the way nitrogen and potash are.

Where Does US Fertilizer Come From? The Short Answer, With Sources

Three nutrients dominate the US fertilizer bag — nitrogen, phosphate and potash — and each one has a different origin story. Nitrogen averaged 59% of total US fertilizer consumption between 2006 and 2023, with potash at 22% and phosphate at 19%, according to USDA’s Economic Research Service. Total US farm fertilizer consumption peaked at 21.0 million metric tons in 2013, held near 20 million tons through 2020, then fell 9.4% to 18.3 million tons in 2021 as COVID-era supply chain disruption, rising energy prices and trade restrictions hit at once, per the same ERS chart-of-note series.

Of that total, nitrogen and potash are where the country runs a real supply gap. ERS’s own reporting states plainly that the US imports over half of the nitrogen fertilizer used on its farms and about 80% of the potash, while it remains a net exporter of phosphate fertilizer overall. The most current trailing-year trade figures — compiled by Investigate Midwest from USDA and Census data for the year ending March 2026 — show the US importing 6.1 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer, 8.7 million tons of potash, and 850,000 tons of phosphate fertilizer, against 39.4 million tons of total fertilizer imports across 2025 and 12.4 million tons in the first quarter of 2026 alone. US farmers spent $33.8 billion on fertilizer in 2024, close to 7% of total farm expenditures that year, the same analysis found.

What Country Does Fertilizer Come From, Nutrient by Nutrient

“What country” is really two different questions depending on the nutrient. For nitrogen, University of Illinois’s farmdoc daily found that nitrogen fertilizer imports averaged more than $4.5 billion a year between 2020 and 2024, with Canada supplying more than 30% of that value — around $1.4 billion a year — while Trinidad and Tobago and Russia split most of the remainder. Canadian natural gas feeds a large share of that nitrogen, too: farmdoc daily notes the US imports over 90% of its natural gas from Canada, worth $8.6 billion in 2023, and natural gas is the feedstock hydrogen source for most Haber-Bosch ammonia.

For potash, the concentration is starker. farmdoc daily’s 2020–2024 average shows Canada supplying more than 80% of US potash imports, with Russia and Belarus together accounting for roughly 15%. Potash import value ranged from $2.5 billion to $6 billion a year between 2018 and 2022. By the year ending March 2026, Investigate Midwest describes Canada’s share as “nearly nine out of every ten tons” of potash imports — a slightly higher concentration than farmdoc daily’s multi-year average, consistent with a market that has only gotten more Canada-dependent, not less.

Phosphate breaks the pattern: farmdoc daily reports that Canada, Mexico and China combined supply less than 1% of US phosphate imports, with Peru and Morocco supplying virtually all of it since 2020. That’s a small volume against a large domestic base — the US remained a net phosphate exporter as of ERS’s most recent framing, with Florida and North Carolina rock covering most of what US farms use.

Where Does the Nitrogen for This Fertilizer Come From? Inside the Haber-Bosch Process

Chemically, the answer is the atmosphere. Air is nearly 78% nitrogen gas (N₂), but that nitrogen is locked in a triple bond plants can’t use. The Haber-Bosch process breaks that bond by combining atmospheric N₂ with hydrogen — usually sourced from natural gas through steam reforming — under 150–300 atmospheres of pressure and 400–500°C in a catalytic reactor, producing ammonia (NH₃). That ammonia is either applied directly as anhydrous ammonia or processed further into urea, ammonium nitrate and ammonium sulfate, the frontline products sold as high nitrogen fertilizer for row crops, pastures, orchards and forestry plantings.

The scale of this single chemical process is hard to overstate. Estimates compiled by Our World in Data converge in the 40–50% range for the share of world population fed by synthetic nitrogen fertilizer: Erisman and colleagues estimated 44% of the global population depended on it in 2000, rising to 48% by 2008, while Rosa and Gabrielli’s 2023 analysis put the figure at roughly half of the global population in 2019. None of that nitrogen is mined — it’s fixed from air using energy, which is why the source of the hydrogen (natural gas today, increasingly electrolyzed “green” hydrogen from renewable electricity in newer projects) matters as much as the nitrogen atom itself.

Nitrogen’s Import Pipeline — and the Price It Carries

Concentrating nitrogen supply in three countries has a direct price consequence: when any one of those supply lines gets disrupted, retail prices move fast. DTN/Progressive Farmer’s weekly survey for the week of June 22–26, 2026, put anhydrous ammonia at $1,076 a ton — up 40% year over year — while urea sat at $720/ton (up 10%), DAP at $910/ton (up 12%), and potash at $494/ton (up just 3%), according to DTN/Progressive Farmer. Potash’s flatter year-over-year move lines up with Canada’s dominant, relatively stable share of that market; anhydrous ammonia’s 40% jump lines up with a nitrogen supply chain split across three countries with very different feedstock costs and, at times, geopolitical exposure.

How to Check Where Your Own Fertilizer Order Came From

The country mix above is a national average, and it will keep shifting as new plants open, tariffs change, and gas prices move. Rather than treating any single number in this article as permanent, use this checklist whenever you need the current picture:

1. Ask your retailer or co-op directly. Bulk fertilizer bills of lading and rail/barge manifests record the originating plant or port; most suppliers can tell you within a day.
2. Read the tag or delivery ticket. Imported urea, UAN and potash carry country-of-origin information tied to the customs entry.
3. Pull the current-year USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries chapter for nitrogen or potash. The US Geological Survey republishes updated country-share breakdowns every January or February.
4. Check USDA ERS’s Fertilizer Use and Price data product and its Fertilizer Imports/Exports series. Both are updated on a rolling basis and are the primary source behind most of the figures in this article.
5. Watch a weekly retail price survey such as DTN/Progressive Farmer’s fertilizer index for the current price signal, which tends to move first when an import lane is disrupted.

Because the national numbers only tell you so much about your own purchase, use the calculator below to translate the shares cited above into tons for your own operation.

Where Does Copper in Fertilizer Come From?

Copper (Cu) is a micronutrient, not a bulk nutrient — crops need it in ounces per acre, not hundreds of pounds — but acidic, sandy, peat and high-organic-matter soils run copper deficient often enough that it’s a standard line item for cereals, citrus and woody crops. Unlike nitrogen, copper isn’t fixed from air; it starts as mined copper ore, smelted and refined, then converted into copper sulfate (CuSO₄) or copper oxide (CuO) for water-soluble fertilizer use, or into chelated forms such as copper-EDTA and copper-EDDHA for better mobility in alkaline, high-pH soils where straight sulfate ties up quickly.

Recycled copper — old wiring, piping and other scrap reprocessed into refined metal — supplements mined supply across the copper industry generally, agriculture included, though the exact split between mined and recycled feedstock for fertilizer-grade copper specifically isn’t broken out in public trade statistics the way nitrogen and potash are. The US Geological Survey’s Mineral Commodity Summaries publishes an annual copper chapter, each January or February, covering domestic mine production, refined output and net import reliance by source country; that is the right place to check the current mix, since the US has moved from a net copper exporter in the early 1990s to a substantial net importer today as its own high-grade ore bodies have been mined down.

Because copper sourcing sits inside the same mineral-supply-chain question as fertilizer nitrogen, it’s worth tracking with the same tools used to prospect for it in the ground. Farmonaut’s satellite-based mineral detection platform is built for exactly that kind of upstream visibility — locating copper, and the other minerals that end up in fertilizer and industrial supply chains, before any ground is broken.

Potash and Phosphate: The Other Two Nutrients in the Bag

Potash is the nutrient most exposed to a single foreign supplier: Canada’s share of US potash imports runs from farmdoc daily’s 2020–2024 average of over 80% up to Investigate Midwest’s “nearly nine out of every ten tons” for the year ending March 2026, with Russia and Belarus historically supplying most of the rest. Domestic potash mining, concentrated in New Mexico and Utah, covers a minority of what US farms use — which is why potash retail prices tend to track Canadian mine output and rail logistics more than any other single factor.

Phosphate is the exception that proves how different these supply chains are. The US mines phosphate rock in Florida and North Carolina, processes most of it domestically, and — per ERS — remains a net exporter of phosphate fertilizer overall. The 850,000 tons the US does import (year ending March 2026, Investigate Midwest) come mostly from Peru and Morocco, since farmdoc daily found Canada, Mexico and China combined supply less than 1% of that import volume. If a fertilizer blend on your farm includes DAP or MAP, most of its phosphate origin is domestic; its nitrogen and potash components are the parts worth checking.

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Also worth revisiting here: Farmonaut’s satellite-based mineral detection platform applies the same non-invasive approach to prospecting for the mineral inputs — including copper and the feedstocks behind nitrogen production — that eventually end up in a fertilizer bag.

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Sector Insight Videos

Two more short videos worth watching, on the discovery side of the mineral supply chain covered above:

FAQs on Where Fertilizer Comes From