Painfully high fuel prices could spell higher farm production costs for months to come, as fertilizer prices continue to rise proportionately with the cost of gas. The correlation between the price of natural gas and nitrogen fertilizer (N) is very high, says Greg Ibendahl, agricultural economist at Mississippi State University. "A perfect correlation would be 1.0, and the correlation between the price of natural gas and the price of fertilizer is 0.79. They are very highly tied together. The odds are that as natural gas prices go up, nitrogen fertilizer prices will increase in a similar fashion," he says.
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