Fertilizer Cost Feeling Effect of Gulf Crisis : Agriculture: Suppliers are passing along to farmers the higher prices they must pay for natural gas, which is essential to the production process.

The Persian Gulf crisis is inflating the cost of fertilizers farmers use to help their crops grow, industry officials say.

Fertilizer costs are moving up because the Middle East provides much of the natural gas that produces ammonia and urea, says Steven R. Beckley, general manager of the California Fertilizer Assn.

Ammonia and urea are vital components of fertilizer because they are “the building blocks for nitrogen products,” Beckley explains.

So, with some Middle East sources of nitrogen-based fertilizers shut off and others unstable at the moment, suppliers around the world have raised their prices, Beckley adds. That includes ammonia fertilizers from Alaska and British Columbia, where California dealers get their supplies.

Prices vary, but nitrogen fertilizers generally are up about 10%, says Bob Krauter of the California Farm Bureau Federation.

Beckley says prices of phosphate fertilizers have also inched up because some Middle East countries provide sulfuric acid used in phosphate rock, the building block for those compounds.

Ammonia-based or nitrogen fertilizers keep plants green and make them grow rapidly while phosphates give the roots strength, Beckley says.

California’s fertilizer industry is tiny because the state doesn’t have large reserves of natural gas, Beckley adds. The only producer he knows of in the state is a potash plant in the Trona area of San Bernardino County.

Even though the state doesn’t have the basic resources, Beckley thinks that its sources of fertilizer are secure because they’re largely domestic: phosphates from Wyoming and Idaho, in addition to ammonia from Alaska.

California farmers haven’t been hit too hard by higher fertilizer prices yet because most crops have been in harvest the past few months.

“The concern will be what will happen now,” the Farm Bureau’s Krauter said. “If the crisis does extend into next year, we’ll be into the spring planting season.”