Here’s why food prices will be a major issue in November

Grocery prices on everyday staples — from bananas to ground beef — likely will spike this fall, just as voters head to the polls.

The Iran war has pushed up the cost of gas used to power tractors on American farms and the long-haul trucks that bring meat and produce to local grocery stores, but agricultural economists say the full scale of food inflation won’t hit for another six months.

At the same time, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has led to a shortage of fertilizer that will likely keep grocery prices high through 2027.

The double whammy is bad news for Republicans in Congress, as research shows voters tend to punish the party in power during times of sustained inflation — as Democrats learned in 2024.

Republicans face another risk, too, as they will need support from hard-hit farming communities to win Senate races in states such as Iowa, Ohio and North Carolina.  

Many Americans are already feeling the squeeze of rising prices, especially at the gas pump, but few are as hurt by the inflation as farmers, many of whom have watched their profits steadily dwindle since President Donald Trump struck Iran in late February.

High gas prices have pushed up costs for Lee Davis, a farmer in Taylor County, Georgia, by more than $1,800 per week, adding hundreds of dollars in costs per acre to his row crops. The diesel Davis needs for his cotton picker has jumped from $3.56 last year to more than $5, according to AAA, and he’s one of the lucky ones — California farmers are facing diesel above $7.40 a gallon. 

“Fuel’s got everything going up,” Davis said of the economic headwinds facing his farm. “Everything’s directly tied to fuel.”

And when farmers face higher costs, consumers end up paying higher prices. But there’s a delay, which means inflation won’t show up at your local supermarket until later this year, said David Ortega, a professor of food economics at Michigan State University.

“There’s a pretty significant lag from when we see a shock, such as what’s happening in the Persian Gulf, to when this trickles down to higher prices at the grocery store,” Ortega said. “It could be the better part of six months or longer before we see the full impacts on this latest shock.”

Some items on store shelves, like beef, which is up about 14% from a year ago, have already gotten more expensive, but that’s because of decisions made as far back as 2022, Ortega said, when a drought forced many cattle farmers to reduce the size of their herds. Similarly, voters won’t see the full scale of food inflation until November. 

Ortega said that the first foods to see price hikes will likely be perishables such as fresh meat and dairy products, fruits, vegetables and seafood. Perishables are often shipped farther than shelf-stable foods and are typically refrigerated during transport. These methods incur high gas and energy usage, and these foods have shorter lifespans than other, nonperishable products, so they will hit shoppers’ wallets first.

The second long-term inflationary pressure facing American farmers is the halting of fertilizer shipments through the Strait of Hormuz — a choke point for roughly one-third of the world’s fertilizer supply, leading to a spike in costs. As an example, the cost of urea, a nitrogen-based fertilizer, has jumped almost 50% since the start of this year.

The effects of those high prices aren’t being felt evenly across the country — only 19% of Southern farmers preordered fertilizer before the price increased, compared with 30% in the Northeast, 31% in the West and 67% in the Midwest, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. Data from the federation also shows that small farms prebooked less fertilizer than large ones across all four regions, meaning they’ll take a bigger hit. 

Even if the strait were to reopen tomorrow — which appears unlikely, as the Trump administration remains at an impasse with Iranian negotiators — the fertilizer crisis would remain and prices would stay elevated through 2027, said Rob Larew, president of the National Farmers Union.

“There is going to be a sustained impact on farmers,” Larew told MS NOW. “That sustained level of prices will ultimately need to flow elsewhere.”

That “elsewhere” will likely be the budgets and credit card statements of shoppers, with both farmers and consumers alike ultimately harmed by the increase in prices. 

Some are fearing a repeat of 2022, when groceries saw double-digit inflation for nine consecutive months. In March, AFBF President Zippy Duvall sent a letter to Trump, warning that the U.S. military’s action in Iran “could lead to disruptions to the food supply chain not seen since 2022.”

Ortega, however, said he doesn’t believe the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz will reach the level of severity due to the Covid-19 pandemic, when global supply chains remained disjointed and an avian flu strain ravaged America’s poultry supply. This April was tied for the highest food inflation since October 2023, but it still remained comparatively low, at just 3.2%. 

“I think the impact is going to be much less now,” Ortega said. “That being said, a lot of that also depends on how long the conflict goes on, and the intensity of the conflict.”

Many farmers like Davis, some of whom are already facing the possibility of bankruptcy because of the war, are preparing for the worst: a prolonged “quagmire,” as Davis put it, that keeps prices high and margins low.

“What scares the daylights out of me is everybody’s already below break even. We’re already losing money multiple years in a row on row crops,” Davis said. “We’re risking everything we’ve got.”

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