👨‍🌾 Farmers Are Worried About The Rising Price Of Fertilizer

In today’s newsletter I discuss how farmers are worried about the rising price of fertilizer, Amazon signs package delivery deal with the USPS, Intel teams up with Elon Musk's Terafab, the new trailer for the movie “The Invite”, just dropped and it looks like just the kind of chaotic cinematography I love, the NASA's Artemis 2’s space toilet is famous (for all the wrong reasons), OpenAI acquired the TBPN podcast, Elon Musk wants to make his company SpaceX’s IPO accessible to everyday retail investors like you and me, and Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton just drifter a Ferrari F40 through the streets of Tokyo in style while his girlfriend Kim Kardashian.

Let’s get into it!

YouTube

Top Story

👨‍🌾 Fertilizer Prices Are Out of Control And Farmers Are Worried!

Today I want to talk about Urea. No, not pee. That’s gross! I’m talking about the form of urea that‘s used as fertilizer by American farmers and cattle ranchers. It’s getting even more expensive. And you know what happens when things get more expensive for farmers and cattle ranchers? You start to see the prices of fruits, vegetables, and beef go up at the grocery store, and it’s already starting to happen. Want to know why? Let’s get into it.

The war in Iran has created a classic economic cause-and-effect scenario. Iran has effectively closed off the Strait of Hormuz, and that means goods like oil, natural gas, and fertilizer aren’t being exported, and it’s already beginning to show up in increased prices.

American farmers are preparing for the upcoming growing season. The cost of fertilizer can represent up to 25% of the total expenses for producing crops like corn. In 2025 approximately 5.7 billion bushels of corn were used to produce ethanol fuel in the U.S., and another 7.7 billion bushels of corn, or roughly 64% of all U.S. corn production, was used to feed livestock.

When the supply of fertilizer contracts, the price goes up. When the price of fertilizer goes up, it affects the prices of things that corn is used to create, grow and feed, like ethanol, crops, and cattle.

Want to see where the economics of rising fertilizer prices gets scary?

Since the beginning of the war in Iran the price of fertilizer has spiked sharply, with urea prices rising 71% in the last 90 days. This has driven up costs by between $100–$140 dollars per metric ton of urea, to now cost between $590–$700 dollars per metric ton globally, but here in the U.S. market we’re beginning to see prices for urea between $600–$800 dollars per metric ton.

Put simply, the price of fertilizer is threatening farmers with near-record high input costs just as they’re getting ready for their Spring planting season. If the price of fertilizer goes up 71%, and represents around 25% of a farmer’s input costs, there is literally no way they’ll be able to recoup those costs when they bring their crops to market. We’re talking about not just higher prices being paid by consumers at the grocery store, but farmers facing a loss for the season before they even plant their first seeds. The typical small farm in the U.S. has a profit margin of less than 10%, with many operating at, or near, break-even each year. There's no way to sugarcoat. It’s tough being a farmer.

In the U.S. we lose roughly 15,000 small farms annually, with 158,000 farms disappearing between 2018 and 2025. In 2025, 315 farms filed for bankruptcy. The bottom line is it’s already hard enough for farmers to make it, and they don’t need another war in the Middle East making their lives even harder.

Quick Hits

📦 Business

Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service aren’t breaking up, as I previously reported they might back in December 2025. It turns out they just announced a massive new deal to keep those packages landing on your doorstep faster than ever before. This partnership is a huge win for the USPS, which is working to grow revenue by $40 billion dollars through its new modernization plan. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is working with the Postmaster, General Louis DeJoy, to make the delivery network more efficient, which it could definitely use some help with.

In 2025 Amazon spent over $100 billion dollars on shipping, so this new agreement with the USPS will help the company control those massive expenses and get packages where they need to go in record time. I’m pretty sure this is a win-win for both organizations.

🎬 Entertainment

Olivia Wilde directs and acts in a new movie called “The Invite”, starring Academy Award winner Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton, and Seth Rogen. I saw the trailer for this movie the other day, and it looks like just my kind of chaotic cinematography that’ll keep me from doomscrolling my phone while I watch the movie (yea, I’m the worst. I know).

“The Invite” is billed as a wild comedy about a dinner party that turns into a mess of secrets and sexual revelations (Do I have your attention now?). Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde play a couple with major relationship issues. Things get crazy when their neighbors, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz, arrive and share too many personal details - like admitting they host weekly orgies. You can probably guess where this is going. They proceed to proposition Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde into joining them. You can see where things could go hysterically sideways with sexual innuendo and the typical neurosis that Seth Rogen brings to nearly every role he plays.

For me this is a movie I can’t wait to see, but I’ll be skipping the theater to stream it at home. Call me prude, but with what I’m guessing will be an awkward comedic energy and sexually charged scenes I’m probably better off watching it at home.

🏦 Tech

Intel has announced they are joining Elon Musk’s massive new Terafab AI chip project to power the next generation of humanoid robots and data centers. The partnership will create a factory for advanced processors that Elon Musk has said will be used to run the Optimus humanoid robot, and power xAI data centers. The Terafab AI chip factory is expected to cost as much as $25 billion dollars.

Intel’s involvement with Elon Musk’s Terafab is part of the company’s $100 billion dollar long-term plans to rebuild its manufacturing base, including its Ohio megafab project, which
will cost as much as $28 billion dollars and is aimed at building two new advanced semiconductor factories. This project is expected to create 3,000 new white collar jobs at Intel, and 7,000 construction jobs during the build phase of the project, which is expected to start development by 2031.

Intel is the only American company that both designs and manufactures leading-edge logic semiconductors at scale within the United States. One has to wonder how long until Elon Musk has the epiphany that he should just acquire Intel to fuel his tech and AI chip ambitions.

🚀 Space

The breakout star of NASA's Artemis 2 moon mission isn't the astronauts - it's a toilet….or more accurately a space toilet. The technical name of this space toilet is the Universal Waste Management System, and it wasn’t cheap. With all things NASA this toilet cost the agency a whopping $23 million dollars, and it doesn’t even work!

The big issue is that using a toilet in zero gravity means you need to use a suction system to suck the human waste away from the body and into some container where it won’t leak or smell. The current space toilet isn’t doing any of that.

The issue is the vent line from the space toilet is filled with frozen urine, which is blocking the waste system from working, and is causing a pretty bad smell onboard the spaceship. So how is NASA trying to fix all this? Well, they literally rotated the spacecraft to face the sun in order to try and thaw the frozen urine line. At a cost of $4.1 billion dollars for the Artemis 2 mission, you’d think NASA would have figured all this out before launching 4 astronauts around the moon. That’s your taxes hard at work!

🤖 AI

OpenAI just made sleeper of an acquisition by buying the tech podcast “Technology Business Programming Network” founded by John Coogan and Jordi Hays (or as ppl in the tech world call it TBPN), and this deal has shocked a lot of people outside of Silicon Valley - but ppl in the know get it. So why would OpenAI buy a podcast with only 75,000 subscribers that’s only 1.5 years old?

The TBPN podcast has the ability to help Sam Altman’s OpenAI shape the global conversation around AI more broadly, and in regards to OpenAI’s ChatGPT more specifically. So from a PR perspective this is a huge win for OpenAI.

What do the founders John Coogan and Jordi Hays get out of it? Well, it’s estimated that OpenAI paid them between $100-$125 million dollars for their podcast and to keep them onboard to continue producing episodes and interviewing thought leaders in the AI space, including Sam Altman of OpenAI who has already been a frequent guest on their show. The podcast was on track to bring in around $30 million dollars this year, so we’re not talking about a couple of guys recording a podcast in their basement, you know…like me.

💵 IPO

Elon Musk is preparing for SpaceX’s massive $2 trillion dollar IPO, and it could completely remake how Wall Street handles Initial Public Offerings in the future. Elon Musk has said he wants to ensure that retail investors (i.e. you and me) have the chance to participate in SpaceX’s IPO and future growth. He’s pushing to give retail investors access to shares during the IPO process. How? Well, he hasn’t shared that part, but fingers crossed it’ll mean you and I have the ability to buy into SpaceX’s IPO at the same price as the big dogs on Wall Street.

🏎️ Sports

Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton just pulled off the coolest promotion for sports car brand Ferrari ever by drifting a rare Ferrari F40 through the streets of Tokyo ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix. This legendary Ferrari F40 is worth more than $4 million dollars, and Lewis Hamilton handled the machine with incredible precision as he drifted it around the legendary Daikoku Parking Area that is famous for Japanese car enthusiasts. The photoshoot was part of the massive branding deal that Lewis Hamilton has with Ferrari, and that was clear by the number of photographers on hand to shoot every minute of the event. When the smoke cleared, guess who was seated in the front passenger seat of the Ferrari F40? None other than Kim Kardashian, who’s rumored to be dating Lewis Hamilton. I literally can’t think of any way this photoshoot could have been any cooler.

Was this email forwarded to you? Did you not hate it?

Then consider subscribing to The Business Behind The News. The only newsletter that brings you the business behind the news, with a healthy dose of sarcasm - all delivered to your inbox once a week in an easily digestible 5-minute read.

The Business Behind The News is written, edited, and published by Chris Thompson.