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Comment by xibalba | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't a 270% increase indicate a huge demand spike?

No it’s a supply side problem, urea is synthesized from ammonia which is synthesized from methane and atmospheric nitrogen. Methane and in general fossil fuel prices spiked and brought fertilizer prices with it. There is probably also a covid labor component as well.

The family farm is planting a lot less corn as a result.

If I remember correctly, sheep urine used to be used to clean particulate traps in large diesel engines. I'm not sure why things moved to synthetic, but if it was for cost reasons then sheep urine may be more cost effective than it used to be.

It was never from urine. It was always chemically synthesized

I work with the bus industry, so this sort of stuff is on my periphery. This is what I was thinking of: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/jun/10/transportintheu...

The family farm is a thing of the past. They are called hobby farms

Hobby farms generally are run by an individual. Family farms are run by families, and thus tend to be much larger to be able to support families.

My father farming on ~400 acres purchased from the government ~140 years ago isn't a hobby. The records for the deed have only my relatives after the Louisiana Purchase. There aren't a whole lot of family farmers left out there, but they do exist (regardless of large operations branding themselves as "family farms" because "I have a family!" and what others classify them as).

How do I interpret this?

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/even-mega-farms-are-mos...

Most farms are "family" owned but perhaps OP was trying to communicate that nowadays farm owners are rarely farm workers?

A very large proportion of farms of any size have a single owner or are split between e.g. brothers.

A rather small proportion of farms are singly/family owned and have a majority of the work done by that family.

Goods whose supply has a natural upper limit in what's easily obtainable (given current methods and infra) and no easy substitutes in their use up the supply chain often have price spikes when (non-spiking) marginal demand suddenly bumps into that limit ... or else when there's a sudden limitation in the ability to deliver the usual supply of the good. Neither of these is a demand spike, per se.

Or a price increase in inputs, or a reduction in supply.

Most nitrogen fertiliser is supplied via natural gas formation (Haber-Bosch process). I'm not sure if urea is HB-formulated nitrogen or comes from other sources, but this wouldn't much matter as HB-formulated ammonia is near-exact substitute for urea and would follow similar pricing patterns.

Reading at Wikipedia iforms me that:

- Urea is CO2(NH2)2.

- Production is from ammonia + carbon dioxide.

Given that natural gas prices are presently spiking, my presumption would be that urea prices are following natural gas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea

Depends what the cause is.

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