The Trump Administration Is Worried About High Fertilizer Prices. Its Top Trade Official Lobbied for Them.

With fertilizer prices spiking due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a majority of American farmers now say they will have a hard time securing their needed supply this year, and President Donald Trump says he is “watching fertilizer prices” closely to prevent price gouging.

But if the president is worried about high fertilizer prices, he might want to have a conversation with his top trade official.

Before joining the Trump administration last year, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer lobbied for policies that limited fertilizer imports and drove up prices for American farmers. Greer represented the J.R. Simplot Company as it successfully persuaded the first Trump administration to impose higher tariffs on fertilizer—despite the opposition from farmers and agricultural interests, who warned that those tariffs would create higher prices and potential shortages.

That part of Greer’s career is not a secret. He testified in front of the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) in favor of those tariffs and later represented Simplot in court as it fended off challenges to them. His connection to Simplot also shows up on his public financial disclosure report.

Indeed, when Greer was nominated to be Trump’s trade representative, the résumé circulated to members of Congress bragged about his role in implementing those tariffs. Greer “led the J. R. Simplot Company’s successful participation in countervailing duty investigations of phosphate fertilizers from Russia and Morocco,” it read.

But it is a part of his career that deserves more scrutiny now as it is suddenly—and somewhat awkwardly—very relevant.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Tuesday that the fertilizer shortage is an “overarching economic pending disaster.” A Farm Bureau survey released last week showed that 70 percent of American farmers are unable to purchase as much fertilizer as they say they will need this year.

The Iran war is the acute cause of these problems—about 30 percent of the world’s supply of fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz. But the crisis has been compounded by the very tariffs that Greer once helped create.

The effort to implement those tariffs began in 2017, during the first Trump administration, as The Intercept detailed in a 2022 article. Two companies, Simplot and Mosaic Co., which together control about 90 percent of the American fertilizer market, were behind the push for higher tariffs. Lobbying records show that Mosaic spent over $800,000 on lobbying each year between 2017 and 2023. (Susie Wiles, now the White House’s chief of staff, lobbied on behalf of Mosaic during that period.)

In March 2021, the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) determined that fertilizer imports from Morocco and Russia “materially injured” American companies and implemented tariffs that range from 16 percent to 47 percent.

A month before that decision was made, Greer testified at an ITC hearing on behalf of Simplot. Imported fertilizer, he said, had caused a “steep decline in prices” that had directly harmed Simplot’s “sales revenues and operating income.”

When asked about the potential consequences of higher tariffs, including the possibility of shortages in the future, Greer downplayed the worry.

“There has been no shortage of fertilizer for the American farmer, and there will be no such shortage,” he told the ITC. “When it comes to real supply in the market, farmers have gotten everything they need, and they will get everything they need for their acreage.”

As the Farm Bureau’s recent survey shows, that no longer seems to be true. Even when it was true, the tariffs imposed high costs. Tariffs on Moroccan fertilizer imports cost U.S. farmers an estimated $6.9 billion between 2021 and 2025, according to a report published earlier this year by the Texas A&M Agriculture and Food Policy Center.

Last month, over 50 farming and agricultural industry groups signed a letter to the U.S. International Trade Commission seeking a reprieve from the tariffs that Greer had played a role in implementing.

Those tariffs had “already prevented farmers from accessing the tools that meet their crop production needs and resulted in lower yields and negative economic impacts,” the groups wrote. Eliminating them would “help restore balance to fertilizer markets by providing immediate relief to growers facing elevated input costs and a lack of availability,” they argued.

Earlier this month, however, Simplot and Mosaic asked the ITC and the Department of Commerce to increase the tariffs on imported fertilizer.

Meanwhile, Deputy Agriculture Secretary Stephen Vaden has criticized Mosaic and Simplot for pushing prices higher. “When the price is high, it’s telling you we need more of whatever the price is high for,” he told reporters earlier this month. And Trump’s Department of Justice is reportedly considering an antitrust case against major fertilizer producers.

In short: Greer’s role in helping implement the fertilizer tariffs seems increasingly at odds with the Trump administration’s desire to reduce prices for farmers amid the war and ongoing supply chain uncertainty.

This disconnect also says some things about the Trump administration’s approach to trade policy more generally.

For one, the idea that tariffs can benefit American businesses always requires ignoring the obvious tradeoffs. Higher fertilizer prices—whether caused by a war or by tariffs—might benefit producers like Simplot, but at the cost of the many, many farmers who must pay more. Similarly, tariffs on steel or aluminum might provide some marginal benefit to domestic producers, but every manufacturer that needs those metals will be hurt. There are always more losers than winners.

Second, despite all the rhetoric about using tariffs to rebuild American manufacturing, the practical reality is that tariff policies are always dictated by lobbying and influence peddling. That means the most powerful and successful corporations have an advantage, and they use it to gain greater protection from competition while forcing downstream markets (in this case, farmers) to absorb the cost.

Greer, of course, could not have known that a future president would launch a reckless and illegal war that caused the Strait of Hormuz to be shut. He could not have known that one of the major consequences of that war would be a dramatic spike in global fertilizer prices.

Even so, in pushing for higher tariffs on imported fertilizer, Greer was weakening—rather than strengthening—a crucial supply chain underpinning America’s farms. Those tariffs forced American farmers to pay higher fertilizer prices even when there wasn’t a crisis. When a crisis did occur, they worsened it. That’s the sort of decision that ought to call into question Greer’s ability to be the Trump administration’s trade representative.

Has Greer’s view of those tariffs changed now that he’s no longer being employed as a lobbyist? If so, he has not indicated that. His office did not respond this week to a request for comment.

However, Greer will not be able to dodge questions from members of Congress. He is expected to appear in front of the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday and the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday.

Lawmakers should take the opportunity to press him on these issues. Does Greer believe high fertilizer prices are good for America, even if the consequences are painful for farmers? Or did he only believe that when he was being paid by a special interest to lobby for tariffs?

It has to be one or the other.