Strategic Assets – March 2026

On the morning of October 13, 1909, Fritz Haber stood in a Stuttgart laboratory and watched liquid ammonia drip from a tabletop reactor no larger than a fire extinguisher. A few drops per hour — that was all. His colleague Carl Bosch, an engineer at the chemical giant BASF, was watching too. Bosch’s job was to figure out how to make those few drops into an industrial flood.

It took Bosch five years, an exploding reactor, and the near-destruction of a test facility in Ludwigshafen. But by 1914, BASF’s plant in Oppau, Germany was producing thousands of tonnes of synthetic ammonia annually — nitrogen fertilizer, pulled directly from the atmosphere.

The timing could not have been more consequential.

When World War I erupted that summer, the British Royal Navy immediately blockaded German ports. The strategy was straightforward: cut off Germany’s access to Chilean saltpeter — the only major source of nitrate for both fertilizer and explosives — and the German war machine would starve within months. No nitrate, no gunpowder. No fertilizer, no food. The blockade was supposed to end the war quickly.

It didn’t work. Because of Haber and Bosch, Germany could synthesize its own nitrate.

The same ammonia that could feed a nation’s crops could fill its artillery shells. A chemistry experiment in Stuttgart had given Germany the ability to wage industrial warfare without a single cargo ship reaching its shores.

The ‘Great War’ dragged on for four more years. Millions died. And the lesson — though few framed it this way at the time — was brutally clear: whoever controls fertilizer supply holds strategic leverage that goes far beyond farming.

Three decades later, a second world war reinforced the point. Control of resources — oil, rubber, steel, food production — determined who won and who lost. When it was over, the United States built an entire global order around making sure those resources would flow freely. American naval power secured the world’s shipping lanes.

The Bretton Woods system anchored global trade to the dollar. NATO, the Marshall Plan, the World Trade Organization — the whole architecture was designed so that nations would trade with each other instead of fighting over raw materials the way they had twice in thirty years.

It worked. Global trade exploded. Supply chains stretched across oceans and continents. And commodities like fertilizer became just another line item on a shipping manifest — cheap, abundant, invisible.

A farmer in Iowa didn’t need to know that his potash came from Saskatchewan or Belarus. A rice grower in Indonesia didn’t think twice about urea from Qatar. The system delivered, reliably, decade after decade.

Nobody thought about where fertilizer came from. Nobody had to.

That era is ending.

And now there’s the Strait of Hormuz.

Everyone knows Hormuz as an oil chokepoint — roughly 20% of the world’s oil passes through those waters.

What almost nobody mentions is that it’s a fertilizer crisis too. The difference is that oil has a Strategic Petroleum Reserve — 400 million barrels sitting in salt caverns in Louisiana and Texas, built for exactly this scenario.

Fertilizer has no such reserve. There is no strategic stockpile.

And the timing matters in a way that oil doesn’t. If gasoline prices spike, consumers feel it at the pump within days — it’s visible, it’s immediate, and politicians respond accordingly. Fertilizer disruptions are invisible for months. Farmers need inputs on a seasonal schedule tied to planting windows. Miss that window, and there’s no catching up. You don’t get a second planting season. The consequence shows up six months later as a smaller harvest, higher food prices, and political instability in countries that can’t feed their populations.

The British Navy understood this in 1914 — cut the fertilizer supply and you break a nation. China understands it now, which is why they’re hoarding. Russia weaponized it in 2022. And the West still hasn’t built any meaningful redundancy into its fertilizer supply chain.

Which is why domestic production — in politically stable jurisdictions with no dependency on contested shipping lanes — becomes extraordinarily valuable in this environment. Not as a speculative bet, but as a strategic reality the market hasn’t priced in.

Food is the ultimate real asset. And so are the necessities to produce it at scale.

As we discussed when we first profiled the fertilizer producer Intrepid Potash back in September — the only large-scale US potash producer — domestic fertilizer operations matter precisely because they sit outside the chokepoints that make global supply chains so fragile. That same logic applies to what we’re about to show you this month.