Are you guessing that fertilizer prices might drop going into spring?
That’s a gamble that fertilizer industry analyst David Asbridge of NPK Fertilizer Advisory Services wouldn’t join you in.
He told attendees at the Canadian Wheat Board’s GrainWorld conference in Winnipeg that he expects U.S. prices to move moderately higher moving into spring, so long as bad weather doesn’t  stop farmers applying fertilizer. Canadian price pressure might be better from a farmer’s standpoint: dealers up here haven’t run their inventories low like American dealers have. But they as well aren’t flush with mountains and oceans of fertilizer that they’ll need to bust out cheap to get rid of. He thinks there it is likely that Canadian fertilizer prices will rise too as spring approaches.
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His longer term outlook is that after the huge surge and swoon of markets in the past three years – since 2007 – we’ll fall back into trendline growth, which is a gradual increase in prices keeping track with demand and inflation, something he thinks farmers will be easily able to afford if grain prices have reached a new, higher plateau level – which he believes they have.
