Emphasizing ROI on Fertilizer

As fertilizer prices remain volatile heading into the fall 2025 application season, ag retailers are pushing growers to move beyond blanket input cuts and focus instead on nutrient efficiency and return-on-fertilizer-investment (ROFI).

The conversation comes as growers continue navigating elevated input costs, geopolitical uncertainty, and tighter operating margins. Across the industry, retailers are increasingly emphasizing efficiency, targeted applications, and ROI-focused fertility management as growers look to preserve margins without sacrificing yield potential.

That pressure is also reshaping how retail networks themselves operate and scale.

“We started as a way for independent retailers to band together and secure better pricing and availability on fertilizer,” Jeff Pritchard, CEO of WestLink Ag, said in an April 24 episode of CropLife’s Retail Week. “Today, we’ve expanded well beyond that to help our members stay competitive in a rapidly changing market.”

While recent geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and disruptions in key shipping routes have amplified concerns, Pritchard notes that fertilizer volatility is not a new phenomenon for the industry.

“It’s probably been since 2021 that we’ve seen escalating fertilizer prices,” Pritchard said. “Across the board — sulfur, ammonia, natural gas — we’ve seen significant cost pressure.”

According to The Mosaic Co., crop nutrition discussions are becoming less about slashing fertilizer costs and more about protecting long-term productivity through smarter nutrient investments.

“Emotion is at the heart of much of this conversation,” says Keith Byerly, Commercial Sustainability Lead at Mosaic. “We have this emotional response to certain price points in fertilizer markets and inputs in general. But elite advisors are really good at shifting the conversation from, ‘Where do we cut?’ to ‘Where do we invest for the best long-term success?’”

Maximizing All Options

That shift in strategy reflects a broader industry move toward nutrient efficiency as both an economic and agronomic priority. Rather than recommending across-the-board reductions, retailers are leaning more heavily on data, precision tools, and nutrient management strategies to help growers maximize returns from every fertilizer dollar spent. Byerly says one of the biggest risks retailers are trying to help growers avoid is making cuts that permanently reduce yield potential or nutrient efficiency.

“If we acted without discipline, we’d be sitting here today in year four of making significant cuts to fertilizer programs,” he says. “The conversation really transitions into how we make smart investments and data-driven decisions instead of emotion-driven decisions.”

The emphasis on strategic nutrient investments comes as the industry continues to focus on nutrient replacement following several strong crop years. In a January 2026 market update, Mosaic noted that “growers are expected to replenish nutrients removed by last year’s strong crop,” underscoring the challenge of balancing short-term cost pressures with maintaining long-term soil fertility and productivity.

That means avoiding what Byerly describes as “blind cuts” to fertilizer programs, making more targeted management decisions. Nutrient interactions, he notes, are often overlooked when growers reduce applications in response to pricing pressure. Retailers are increasingly emphasizing that nutrient programs cannot be evaluated in isolation.

Sulfur is one example. While sulfur prices have climbed alongside broader global supply disruptions, cutting sulfur rates can create downstream impacts across the entire fertility program.

“If I make the decision to cut sulfur out of my application because sulfur has gotten expensive, I’m really affecting how optimized my nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium rates can be,” Byerly says. “I’m not considering the uptake interactions that happen between those nutrients.”

Byerly says many fertilizer decisions need to be made by a true return analysis.

“Fertilizer decisions are often made based on, ‘Let’s do what we did last year,’” he says. “Instead of sitting down and creating a plan.”

That mindset is beginning to shift as retailers focus more heavily on acre-by-acre profitability and ROFI calculations. Rather than evaluating only the lowest cost per pound of nutrient, retailers are helping growers assess whether premium products, biologicals, or enhanced-efficiency fertilizers can generate stronger overall returns.

“We tend to let the buck stop at what the cost per pound of nutrient is instead of looking at the efficiency,” Byerly says. “If I can get 10% or 15% more efficiency with an investment of a few cents more per pound, I’ve really opened the door for a better return on that investment.”

Byerly compares the conversation to investment management, where long-term return potential often matters more than upfront cost alone.

“We don’t look at the cost of a blue-chip stock versus a penny stock,” he says. “We look at which one gives us the better return. We’ve got to be more conditioned to that as we look at crop inputs.”

The Role of Technology

Technology is also playing a larger role in helping make those decisions. Soil testing, variable rate technology, in-season crop nutrition programs, and digital agronomy platforms are allowing retailers to move beyond broad-acre recommendations toward more targeted resource allocation.

“We had a lot of really great tools in precision agriculture that were siloed,” Byerly says. “We could do a good job looking at soil samples or irrigation efficiency or population response, but we failed at integrating all of those into one decision-management system.”

That integration is now becoming more achievable through artificial intelligence-driven agronomy platforms and connected digital tools. Byerly believes the next major leap in nutrient efficiency will come from systems capable of integrating agronomic data streams into predictive recommendations before deficiencies or stress impact yield.

“We’ve got all these roads that are disjointed and take different routes to get to the same endpoint,” he says. “If we can consolidate those lanes together into a superhighway, we’re going to have a lot more efficiency.”

Retailers are also becoming more strategic in how they prioritize fertility investments across entire farming operations. Instead of treating every acre equally, many growers are focusing resources on their highest-performing ground.

“Growers are looking at where 50% of their production comes from the top 20% or 25% of their acres,” Byerly says. “And they’re making resource allocation decisions accordingly.”

As margins tighten and fertilizer markets remain unpredictable, retailers that can connect agronomy, economics, and technology may be best positioned to help growers protect both yield potential and profitability.

Ultimately, Byerly says retailers are evolving into more comprehensive agronomic and financial advisors as profitability pressures intensify.

“The true advisor role,” he says, “moves beyond the cost-per-acre discussion and into the ROFI conversation.”