Prices may drop slightly in coming months, but farmers are expected to be hit this year with a 33 percent increase in fertilizer costs, a government-funded report said. Nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas. The problem was, it was all government payments. Those payments are the reason there wasn't a wholesale farm crisis like the 1980s, said Roy Frederick, an agricultural economics professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Behind the problem are crop prices, which plummeted in the late 1990s because of lagging exports and heavy worldwide production.
Many farmers are too weary to wait.