Drought, screwworm, and a fertilizer probe: the week the food machine ran out of slack

The week’s food news was really one story told three ways: what happens when a supply chain has no slack. A drought thins the wheat. A parasite threatens the cattle. A few firms set the fertilizer price. In each case there is no cushion to absorb the shock — so the shock travels straight to the price.

The wheat that the heat ate

Start in Kansas, the biggest wheat state in the US. This past winter was its warmest in 34 years, and the rain didn’t come [3]. By late May, 57% of the state was in drought — the long-run normal for this point is 22% [3][9]. In the worst fields, farmers expect 5 to 10 bushels per acre, against a healthy crop of 40 or more, and the USDA reckons about 17% of the state’s winter wheat will simply be abandoned — left unharvested because it’s not worth the diesel [3].

The damage doesn’t stop at this year’s loaf. Drought-stressed wheat makes poor seed, so there may not be enough good seed to plant this autumn [8]. “I am concerned that there is not going to be enough seed wheat to go around this fall,” said Mark Lubbers, a wheat specialist at Bayer [8]. Normally a seed company shifts supply from a good region to a bad one. This drought is so wide — Texas to Wyoming — that there’s nowhere with a surplus to move [8]. That is what “no slack” means: the usual shock absorber is gone.

A commodity is a raw crop traded as an interchangeable bulk good. Kansas wheat is priced against everyone’s wheat, so a shortage anywhere can lift the price everywhere. Yet this week wheat futures actually fell — July Chicago wheat dropped to about $6.02 a bushel — because rain finally arrived in the southern Plains, and traders price tomorrow’s weather, not today’s parched field [8][9]. The lesson in that whiplash: in a tight market, every forecast moves money, because there’s no inventory buffer to calm it.

Beef at a record, and a flesh-eating fly heading north

Ground beef hit an average $6.90 a pound this month — up 77% since January 2020, when it was $3.89 [13]. The cause is years in the making. Drought and high costs pushed ranchers to sell off breeding cows, shrinking the US cattle herd to its smallest in 75 years [13]. Cattle take years to raise, so you can’t refill the herd in a season. Supply is stuck low while demand stays strong — and the price climbs.

Now a new threat is closing in: the New World screwworm, a fly whose larvae burrow into living flesh [13]. The US wiped it out in the 1960s, but it’s spreading up through Mexico and Central America, with cases within 100 miles of the border [13]. To keep it out, the government banned live cattle imports from Mexico — the feeder cattle that normally fatten in US feedlots before slaughter [13]. So the defensive move itself tightens supply further. The government is also spending $750 million on a facility to breed sterile flies, an old trick: release sterile males, and the wild population can’t reproduce [13]. Don’t expect cheaper beef soon. As one Texas A&M economist put it, rebuilding a herd takes time, “however long that takes” [13].

Who sets the fertilizer price?

If the field is where food starts, fertilizer is the field’s biggest bill. This week the Federal Trade Commission — the US competition regulator — confirmed it has opened an antitrust investigation into fertilizer prices, and the Justice Department is looking too [12]. “USDA data has shown the single largest increase in input costs of farmers across the United States since 2020 has come from fertilizer,” said FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson [12].

The mechanism here is concentration, not weather. A handful of companies make most of the world’s potash and nitrogen, so when costs spike — as they did this spring after attacks on Iran disrupted trade in those nutrients — prices can stay high even when the original shock passes [12]. A concentrated market has the same problem as a drought-hit one: no competitive slack to pull the price back down. Whether that’s collusion or just a tight market is exactly what the probe has to prove, and Ferguson was frank that it’s hard: “We’re only as good as the evidence we find” [12]. There was one small easing — potash fell last week for the first time in 14 weeks [12].

Farmers got a separate cost break: the US cut tariffs on imported farm machinery like combines from 25% to 15%, effective June 8 [9]. It matters because input costs are the squeeze of the moment — 51% of farmers in a Purdue survey named high input costs as their top worry [9].

A study on how junk food got engineered

A new issue of the American Journal of Public Health lays out a striking claim: the tobacco industry used its cigarette playbook to sell ultra-processed food [4]. Ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, are industrial formulations — think packaged snacks and ready meals built from refined ingredients and additives, not whole foods. When tobacco firms like Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds bought food companies such as Kraft and Nabisco, researchers say they carried over the same techniques: tune fat and sugar for a “quick hit of reward that fades” so you reach for more, and roll out “light” and “reduced-fat” versions to keep customers who might otherwise quit [4]. One researcher read over 100 once-secret industry documents to draw the parallel [4].

Treat the health figures carefully. A Harvard nutrition professor cited observational studies linking high-UPF diets to a 58% higher risk of dementia [4]. Observational means the studies watched what people ate and what happened — they can’t prove the food caused the outcome, only that the two move together. The researchers call the link “biologically plausible,” which is a reason to take it seriously, not a verdict [4]. The firmer finding isn’t medical; it’s industrial — that these products were designed to be overeaten.

A second study is a useful caution against simple food rules. Yale researchers fed mice 12 high-fat diets with identical calories, differing only in the fat source [20]. Oleic acid — the main fat in olive oil, long called heart-healthy — sped up pancreatic tumour growth in mice bred to be prone to it, while omega-3 fats from fish oil slowed disease [20]. This is a mouse study about one cancer, not dietary advice for people. But it makes the point cleanly: a single nutrient is rarely “good” or “bad” on its own. Context — dose, the rest of the diet, the body — decides.

The quiet story: the protein hype is correcting

Away from the headlines, the money behind “future food” is retreating. Global agrifood-tech funding was $16.2 billion in 2025, down from a $54.6 billion peak in 2021 [14]. Insect farming — once pitched as a clean protein source — is in what one founder calls a “painful correction,” with several big firms bankrupt [16]. The reason is plain economics. Buyers want insect protein meal under about £1.50 a kilo; most Western producers need £3 just to break even [16]. The math doesn’t add up [16].

The survivors are reframing the business. FlyBox’s founder argues insect farms work not as a premium protein play but as waste management — get paid to consume food waste, instead of paying for feedstock [16]. That’s the same slack lesson from the other end: a business with no margin between its cost and its price has no room to survive a downturn, exactly as a farmer with thin yields has none to absorb a bad year. When the buffer is gone — in a crop, a herd, a market, or a balance sheet — the shock has nowhere to hide. It shows up at the till.