Authored by Owen Evans via The Epoch Times,
President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he is considering support for U.S. farmers struggling with high fertilizer prices, as rising energy costs and market volatility continue to squeeze producers across the farm belt.
A farm field near West Bend, Iowa, on May 6, 2026. Scott Olson/Getty Images"I am looking at doing a form of help," Trump told reporters at the White House, without giving details.
Farmers face pressure from fertilizer and fuel costs, both of which have been affected by the conflict with Iran and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for global energy and fertilizer trade.
Fertilizer prices have eased from recent highs, with granular urea prices in New Orleans falling to $453.50 per short ton, their lowest level since Feb. 6, reported Bloomberg Green Markets on June 8.
That was down 36 percent from a mid-April peak.
The market remains vulnerable to disruption, particularly because urea is the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer and nearly half of global urea exports come from countries affected by the Middle East conflict.
High fuel prices have also hit farmers.
Diesel prices reached record highs in parts of the Midwest in May, including Indiana and Illinois, due to the Iran war. Grain and soybean farmers are especially exposed because diesel is needed for tractors, combines, irrigation, and crop transport.
The pressure in farming has become a heated political issue in Washington.
At a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing on June 10, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) challenged Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins over whether Trump administration policies had increased farmers' costs.
"Georgia farmers are telling me that they continue to struggle with high costs, costs exacerbated by President Trump's war in Iran, and his tariffs - which is a tax on all of us on virtually everything," Warnock said.
Warnock said that the administration had lowered tariffs on some farm equipment and asked whether that move was an acknowledgement that tariffs had raised the cost of farming.
However, Rollins defended the administration's record, saying it was working to reduce the agricultural trade deficit.
"We're cutting that $50 billion agricultural trade deficit in half that we inherited a year and a half ago," she said.
Warnock pressed again, asking whether tariffs had increased costs for farmers, saying Rollins was "forecasting" future results rather than answering the question.
Rollins said that the Trump administration is "reshoring fertilizer back to America."
"In two or three weeks, we're going to break ground in Louisiana on what will be the largest fertilizer plant in the world," she said.
In May, farmers called for emergency relief and adoption of key bills to stem soaring fertilizer costs.
"American farmers are price-takers on both ends, paying monopoly prices for inputs they must buy, then accepting commodity prices they cannot control, with no pricing power on either side," Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said during a May 12 Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee hearing.
"That's not a market. It's a trap for the American farmers."
"Simply put, farmers need more competition in this marketplace," South Dakota Corn Growers Association president Trent Kubik said.
"Federal antitrust laws exist for precisely this reason - to promote and sustain competition, the lifeblood of our economy.
"Increased competition for more participants in the fertilizer manufacturing space is the only thing that can deliver meaningful and durable price relief."
The concern is not limited to the United States.
European Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen said this week that Europe needs long-term fertilizer solutions to avoid food shortages.
"We need to do our homework as well and address the issues to make fertilizers not only available but also affordable, because, otherwise, there will be food shortages in the European Union," Hansen told Euronews on June 10.
He said many European farmers were considering not planting because production had become too expensive and they could not easily pass on the costs.
Reuters and John Haughey contributed to this report.
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/13/2026 - 15:10Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,
Then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins, around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, acknowledged that he secretly assisted with a paper stating the virus that causes COVID-19 "is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," according to a newly released missive.
Dr. Francis Collins speaks in Washington on Sept. 9, 2020. Michael Reynolds/Getty Images"This is work that Tony, Jeremy, Larry, and I helped with, but are appropriately not mentioned explicitly in the paper," Collins said in the March 6, 2020, email to NIH officials, which was released by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on June 11.
Tony refers to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime head of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases through late 2022. Jeremy refers to Jeremy Farrar, at the time the director of the Wellcome Trust. Larry refers to Dr. Lawrence Tabak, an NIH official.
Collins noted the conclusion that stated, "The analysis of public genome sequence data from SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses found no evidence that the virus was made in a laboratory or otherwise engineered." SARS-CoV-2 is the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The first COVID-19 cases appeared in Wuhan, China, in 2019, near a laboratory that was conducting enhanced experiments on coronaviruses funded by the NIH.
Collins was responding to an email from Kristian Andersen, one of the authors of the paper, which was titled "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2." Andersen and other scientists said in the paper, published on March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine, that they analyzed data and concluded that it came from nature.
To date, no natural source has been identified for the virus. The Trump administration maintains the virus came from the Wuhan lab.
The paper did not mention any contributions from Collins, Fauci, Tabak, or Farrar, who made at least one critical change to the document, according to emails released by lawmakers in 2023. It thanked American virologist Michael Farzan "for discussions" and the Wellcome Trust "for support." Nature did not return a request for comment by the time of publication. Collins did not respond to a request for comment.
Collins told lawmakers in 2024 that his role "was for information, not for me to edit," that he never edited or suggested edits to the paper, and that, to his knowledge, neither did Fauci or Farrar. He also said he is not a virology expert.
Change In StanceEarly drafts of the paper had the authors stating that it was possible that the virus came from a lab. In private messages, since made public, the authors also said that characteristics of the virus indicated it was manmade. They have defended the changes in their stances as being driven by evidence.
In the newly released emails, Andersen, who has said that the paper was "prompted" by Collins, Fauci, and Farrar, had written to the trio.
"Thank you again for your advice and leadership as we have been working through the SARS-CoV-2 'origins' paper," he said.
He told them he welcomed comments, suggestions, and questions about the paper, which had just been accepted for publication.
Collins said in a previously released email to Fauci, Tabak, and others in April 2020 that he was wondering whether the NIH could "help put down this very destructive conspiracy," linking to an article alleging the pandemic started in a lab in Wuhan.
"I hoped the Nature Medicine article on the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 would settle this," he said. "But probably didn't get much visibility. Anything more we can do?"
Collins told lawmakers in 2024 that in the email, "I meant that we should do what we can to get the truth out there, as opposed to statements that were reckless and speculative that were not based on evidence." He said that the possibility that the virus came from the lab, whether it originated there or not, was not a conspiracy theory.
Fauci Shared Another PaperFauci, who has denied allegations that Proximal Origins was written to disprove the lab origin theory, met on multiple occasions with intelligence officials in 2020 and 2021. James Erdman III, a CIA operations officer, told Paul and other senators in May that Fauci provided a list of experts to whom the intelligence community (IC) should talk, and that the list included the Proximal Origins authors.
"Dr. Anthony Fauci influenced the IC's analytic process and COVID origin's findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC consulted with a conflicted list of curated Subject Matter Experts (SME), public health officials, and scientists," Erdman said.
Fauci has not returned emails seeking comment on Erdman's testimony and the missives Paul just released.
One of those emails showed Fauci wrote to Beth Cameron, a National Security Council official, on July 8, 2021, a day after he took part in a council briefing.
"The article accessible from the link in the subject line above just came out as a 'preprint' yesterday. It is from a group of highly qualified virologists," Fauci wrote. "Please show it to your team. It summarizes what I said yesterday."
The article, titled "The Origin of SARS-CoV-2," included Farrar and Anderson as coauthors. The authors said that there was "currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin" while there was evidence supporting links to animal markets in Wuhan.
Fauci "was pushing the natural-origin story while secretly getting classified briefings on the actual origins," Paul wrote in a post on X. "The American people were told one story. These documents - and a CIA officer's sworn testimony - tell another," he added in a follow-up post.
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/13/2026 - 14:00