…For the northern hemisphere, fertiliser for next year’s growing season will be needed towards the end of this year.

We can expect food prices to rocket.

And in the UK, we have only a single fertiliser manufacturing plant left

https://overcast.fm/+8dw8WNRF4

…If it’s not already obvious, we need to be instituting a Dig For Victory style programme, except it won’t be about ‘victory’, it will be Grow Food To Live Better.

We need national communal regenerative farming started now. Which among other things, means compulsory land orders on wasteful tracts of privately-owned land.

But I guess we’ll wait until hunger ravages because we have one of the stupidest governments of my lifetime in power

…I’m a climate and biosphere collapse-concerned web designer. So aside from shit posting like an old fart, I tend to post about environment and tech.

Being a tech heavy community, Mastodon tends to prick its ears up a bit more when I post about tech. Posts about food systems like the above, not so much.

So by way of a lead in to where this thread is going shortly (and may subsequently continue), here following is a *tech* angle on the Straits of Hormuz being more or less closed…

…The following is taken from a transcript of something I’ll share a link to in a bit.

“The majority of crude oil that passes through the Straits of Hormuz is classified as sour crude with a high sulfur content, and when you refine sour crude, you produce elemental sulfur as a byproduct.

When we pull ~17 million barrels a day of sour crude off the market, we’re not just losing fuel, we also are potentially losing sulfur…

…“And sulfur’s the feedstock for sulfuric acid and sulfuric acid is what we use to leach copper and cobalt out of the ground in places like the DRC and Zambia. The two of those countries together supply over a sixth of global copper and more than 70% of global cobalt.

So the little oil snafu in the Straits of Hormuz could lead to no marginal copper or cobalt.

No transformers, no grid expansion. No grid expansion, no data centers, which means no EV charging infrastructure, no AI build out, etc…

…“So this chain – Hormuz to sulfur, to acid, to copper, to transformers, to compute – really has very little to do with gasoline prices.

But it’s one example of the complexity and risk of our interconnected just in time system.”

- - -

That’s the tech lens. Next up, linking back to food at the top…

…“So here’s another hotter effect: Natural gas.

Qatar sits inside the Persian Gulf. They’re responsible for roughly 20% of all globally traded LNG.

Europe spent two years after Ukraine’s invasion rewiring its entire energy import infrastructure away from Russia’s pipeline gas towards US and Qatari LNG.

So European dependency now runs directly through the closed Straits of Hormuz. And unlike oil, there is no overland alternative for LNG…

…“And the [LNG] price spikes are already hitting European importers and futures markets.

There’s also nitrogen fertilizer. Over 40% of internationally traded nitrogen fertilizers originate from or are navigated through the Persian Gulf.

Nitrogen fertilizer starts with natural gas, which is then the feedstock for ammonia, which becomes urea, which goes on the fields around the world, and a disrupted planting cycle could translate into food price inflation very quickly, within months…

…“The wide boundary point here is this.

We’re not watching an oil price shock.

We’re watching the exposure of a civilization that organized itself around maximum efficiency and zero redundancy, and built a single point of geopolitical failure into the center of a global physical economy, the Straits of Hormuz and the situation there is the most consequential single location on the planet for the foreseeable future.”

…At this point, I’ll share where the transcript across the preceding 8 posts is from.

It’s a half hour podcast episode:

‘Wide Boundary News: The Iranian War, Rising Gas Prices, and the Single Point Failure’

Audio: https://overcast.fm/+BTumXe5m9g
Text [pdf]: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Frankly-130-Transcript-WBN-10-March-2026.docx.pdf

I’ll go on to share a bit more but I recommend listening to the whole thing.

…The next bit gets into military asymmetry and dependencies.

“In ecology and economics, stocks are what’s accumulated and flows are what moves through them.

The problem is that flows feel infinite right up until the stock runs out. And I refer to this as the slurping sound with respect to oil extraction.

Stocks and flows apply to military capacity as well…

…“The US has historically had the most impressive offensive flow, capacity: shock and awe, precision strikes, the ability to put bombs on target anywhere on earth, within hours.

But the stocks, particularly the stocks of things like interceptor missiles maybe getting dangerously low.

I’m told by people who follow this closely that the US and Israel have been firing 5 to 7 interceptors for every incoming Iranian missile…

…“And by the way, each of those interceptors cost millions of dollars and takes months to manufacture.

A PAC-3 interceptor costs like $4 million. In contrast, a Shahed drone made in Iran costs around $50K. That’s a cost-exchange ratio of about nearly 100:1 in Iran’s favor. So Iran doesn't need to win the Air War outright. They probably just need to keep up intermittent launches long enough to limit what the US can shoot back with…

…“And Secretary of State Rubio said publicly that Iran is producing offensive weapons faster than the US and its allies can manufacture interceptors to stop them. And the Secretary of War suggested this war may go on for months.

The US is historically structured for periodic high intensity bursts, not
sustained engagement. The assumption has always been overwhelming force, short duration, then restock. But that model does not hold if a conflict drags on. Especially a large conflict.”

…If there’s a single sentence to take away from the above, it’s:

“Flows feel infinite right up until the stock runs out”.

- - -

But that’s enough for now. If it’s too much for you, then sorry, mute or block me.

I’m not going to be not interested in this stuff.

…People who have read the entire thread (most of it are not my words) may have noticed:

“about one third of the world’s fertiliser demand” is me voicing James Meadway on the podcast linked at he top.

“Over 40% of internationally traded nitrogen fertilizers” is me quoting Nate Hagens.

Obviously, whatever the actual numbers are matter and are consequential. But for the purposes of this thread, please treat them as a heuristic, a window into astonishing complexity and fragility focused into…

…the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, bodies of water 200 miles wide at their widest and about 750 miles from Basra in the north to Muscat in the south.

Which makes it roughly the area of the UK.

Map courtesy of https://thetruesize.com

…I keep adding to this thread 😬

The reason I said https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116232633085736906 in this thread’s post #3 is because I understand that fertilisers are a sort of Faustian pact:

Yes, they massively ramp up yields, but that has an *enormous cost*:

A. Modern industrialised agriculture accounts for about 1/3rd of greenhouse gas emissions
B. It is denuding soils, polluting water: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116238945720345864
C. A+B combined are loading further precarity into our food systems: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111555969227295370