May. 8, 2026, 12:29 PM EDT

John Bartman knows the challenges of being a farmer. His family has been tilling Illinois soil since James K. Polk sat in the Oval Office, weathering droughts, trade disputes, market crashes and a Civil War in the process.

But now, with Donald Trump behind the Resolute Desk, fertilizer shipments have been halted through the Strait of Hormuz — a choke point for roughly one-third of the world’s fertilizer supply — and the resulting price spike is causing Bartman’s profits to disappear.

After years of turmoil for American farmers, “it’s just another straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Bartman said.

New data from the American Farm Bureau Federationan agricultural lobbying firm, warns that Bartman isn’t alone: Some 70% of American farmers may be unable to afford all the fertilizer their fields require.

It’s the latest in a series of economic headwinds that have slammed the U.S. agricultural industry over the past decade, causing farm bankruptcies to jump 46% from 2024 to 2025. The AFBF reported that this year 58% of its members said their financial situation had worsened since early 2025, while just 6% reported improvement.

Map: Carson Elm-Picard / MS NOW; Source: American Farm Bureau Federation

“Many farms were broadly in a situation of net negative margins, where they’re losing money, and this just compounds the problem,” Shawn Arita, the associate director of North Dakota State University’s Agricultural Risk Policy Center, said of the fertilizer shortage. “It was a very difficult situation before March 1, and now it’s certainly a lot more challenging.”

The shortage has caused the price of fertilizer jump from around $400 per ton in January to more than $600 per ton this week, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The impact of those high prices won’t be felt evenly across the U.S. — 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 AFBF.

Chart: Carson Elm-Picard / MS NOW; Source: American Farm Bureau Federation

Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, have sought to downplay the severity of the inflation.

Rollins told Fox Business that “America has plenty of fertilizer” for its farmers, and Vance acknowledged the shortage but dismissed the conflict behind the inflation as “a little blip in the Middle East” during a speech on Tuesday. That same day, Rubio echoed Rollins’ claimsaying that it was only Iran’s fertilizer, not the United States’, that was stranded in the Persian Gulf.

While the U.S. is a major exporter of fertilizer globally, it still produces only about 9% of the global supply and remains a net importer of the good, according to the USDA, meaning that supply chain disruptions on the other side of the world still affect domestic market prices.

That could be why Rollins is now considering reviving a Biden-era initiative that pledged $900 million to funding the construction of new fertilizer plants in the U.S. That initiative, the Fertilizer Production Expansion Program, was eliminated during Trump’s second term “due to Presidential Executive Orders,” according to the USDA website.

Even if the initiative was resuscitated or the Strait of Hormuz reopened tomorrow, farmers would be paying inflated prices through 2027, even into 2028, Arita said. Rep. Don Bacon., R-Neb., a member of the House Agriculture Committee, told MS NOW that the Trump administration should “re-examine their tariff policies” to alleviate the strain on farmers, but did not comment on the effects of the Iran War.

Chart: Carson Elm-Picard / MS NOW; Source: American Farm Bureau Federation

Another committee member, Rep. April McClain Delaney, D-Md., said the high fertilizer prices are “reflective of a much larger crisis” caused by the Trump administration — one that has already hit her constituents.

“Farmers in my district are facing tough choices about whether they can afford to plant at all,” said Delaney, who represents Maryland’s largely rural 6th Congressional District. “This administration’s reckless actions and the flawed farm bill are failing our farmers.”

The House Agriculture Committee’s Republican leadership, Chairman Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania and Vice Chairman Austin Scott of Georgia, did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

Fertilizer inflation isn’t the only thing pushing up costs for farmers; diesel prices in the U.S. have jumped from about $3.80 at the start of the war to more than $5.60 as of May 4 , according to USDA data. That in turn has made it more expensive for all farmers to do business — even small growers like Leah Dannar-Garcia, an organic farmer in Wichita, Kansas, who doesn’t use synthetic fertilizer.

“Farms have been just hanging on with the soybean debacle last year,” Dannar-Garcia said, referring to the Trump administration’s $20 billion bailout of Argentinawhich spurred China to reduce its U.S. agricultural imports. “It’s had a devastating effect.”

As a soybean farmer, Bartman was particularly affected by that decision. Arita said the situation now is having an “asymmetric impact” on American agriculturalists, as farmers are paying more to grow and sell their crops, but aren’t necessarily able to raise prices on consumers to match. That in turn leads to lost profit and endangered livelihoods.

“They’re running the American farmer into the ground and out of business,” Bartman said of the Trump administration. “The only thing that is cheaper today than three years ago in the United States is a bushel of soybeans.”

Adam Hudacek is a desk associate for MS NOW covering national politics in Washington, D.C.

May. 8, 2026, 12:28 PM EDT

This week a judge in the Southern District of New York unsealed what appears to be a suicide note from Jeffrey Epstein. The note is unsigned and as yet unauthenticated. Many have immediately declared it a fake. But I’ve spent hundreds of hours combing through the Epstein files as a journalist, and there is strong evidence for its authenticity.

First, though: How did this note only come to light now? The pivotal character in this story is Epstein’s original cellmate at the Manhattan Correctional Center, Nicholas Tartaglione. The ex-cop-turned-steroid-dealer and animal rescuer was awaiting trial for quadruple murder. In the early morning of July 23, 2019Tartaglione began banging on his cell door to summon the guards. They found Epstein unresponsive on the floor with a makeshift noose around his neck.

Epstein initially claimed that his cellmate tried to strangle him. This was a dubious allegation, given that it was Tartaglione who yelled for help. Epstein may have made the accusation against his cellmate in order to keep himself off suicide watch and dodge a disciplinary write-up for self-harm. He almost immediately backtracked, however, and said he didn’t remember what happened. Epstein later assured prison staff that he didn’t feel threatened by Tartaglione and that he was happy to continue being housed with him. He was moved anyway.

Last year, Tartaglione”https://jessicareedkraus.substack.com/p/epsteins-cellmate-yes-he-killed-himself”>told podcaster Jessica Reed Kraus that he found the note tucked in a book shortly after Epstein’s suicide attempt and handed it over to his lawyer, who used it as evidence of good conduct in Tartaglione’s trial. Because the note was subject to attorney-client privilege, the judge in the case sealed the record. He unsealed it after lawyers for The New York Times successfully argued that Tartaglione nullified the privilege by describing the note on Kraus’ podcast.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan prosecuted Tartaglione, and many observers are rightly skeptical about anything involving Epstein and this Justice Department. Under President Donald Trump, the department’s credibility is negligible in light of its outrageous foot-dragging on releasing the Epstein files and its frantic attempts to shield the president from the fallout. The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, was dispatched to interview Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell last summer. Thereafter, Maxwell was transferred to a cushy prison with yoga and puppies after she said she never saw Trump or Epstein do anything inappropriate.

While we can’t be sure the note is legit until the forensic document examiners weigh in, to me it’s vintage Epstein. For one thing, it starts with a rant about how prosecutors investigated him for “NOTHING!!!” The insistence that the charges against him were baseless and that the government was persecuting him — that’s Jeff, all right.

Furthermore, in poring through the Epstein files, I’ve gotten to know the sex offender’s writing better than I ever wanted to. The handwriting is very similar to a note found in Epstein’s cell after his death. Both notes include the all-caps phrase “NO FUN” and a liberal sprinkling of double exclamation marks.

Even the note’s most distinctive line strengthens the case for authenticity: “It is a treat to choose my time to say goodbye. Watcha want me to do? — Bust out cryin!!”

The latter sentence caught the attention of skeptics. “We’re talking about a highly educated individual,” Fox News correspondent Kevin Corke told host Laura Ingraham. “Would he say that? I’m not so certain.”

Actually, Epstein was a college dropout whose default email style can charitably be described as a half-literate stream of consciousness. Corke is picking up on something important, however: The words are from someone else. And the Justice Department’s Epstein files have the answer.

The files reveal that Epstein used the obscure “cryin” catchphrase in emails to his brother and his childhood friend. It’s an apparent reference to a Little Rascals short film from 1931, in which one of the Little Rascals, a Black child named Stymie, brushes off his friend Farina’s grief that he is about to be shipped off to an orphanage. In both emails, Epstein used it to chide the recipients for getting sentimental about something. It sounds alien to Epstein because it’s a Hollywood screenwriter’s take on African American Vernacular English. But if the note was forged, the forger would have to know this remarkably obscure reference.

And if it’s a forgery, who forged it? Tartaglione’s lawyer insists the note is real, but his client might have manufactured it as insurance against an attempted murder accusation from Epstein. Let’s be clear that Tartaglione’s credibility is negligible. He was convicted of four counts of murder. He maintains his innocence, even though the victims were kidnapped from his brother’s bar and the corpses were found in a mass grave on his property. We don’t know if Tartaglione ever saw Epstein’s handwriting, but even if he did and he’s a very proficient forger, that still wouldn’t explain how he’d know about Epstein’s Little Rascals fandom.

Some conspiracists insinuate that the federal government forged the note to help cover up the murder they were planning for Epstein. We know the current Justice Department couldn’t have forged the note because Tartaglione’s lawyer says he received it in 2019 and entered it into the legal record prior to Trump’s second term. If the government went to all the trouble of forging it years ago, why not use it at the time to quiet rumors that Epstein was murdered? If they forged it, they knew it existed and they could have gotten ahold of it anytime. The DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General included Tartaglione as a source in its 2023 report on Epstein’s death. Yet it didn’t cite the note in the report. Instead, the note was produced by the trial judge after a New York Times reporter heard about it on a podcast and asked to have it unsealed. The timeline doesn’t fit the conspiratorial interpretation.

The timeline, phrasing and handwriting all point toward the authenticity of this note. But we can’t be 100% sure. What we can be sure of is that Epstein was a serial sex offender whose wealth allowed him to avoid accountability for years. Years after his death, a full accounting remains elusive. And his victims are still waiting for justice.

Lindsay Beyerstein is an investigative journalist in Brooklyn, New York. She writes a weekly column for The Editorial Board and is working on a book about conspiracy theories and American politics. Follow her on Bluesky.