Ride the cage a kilometre straight down into a Saskatchewan potash mine and the walls turn a soft pink, seams of salt left by a sea that dried up hundreds of millions of years ago. Boring machines gnaw at the face; conveyors haul the ore up to daylight, where it is crushed into the pinkish-white granules that become the potassium in fertilizer, the nutrient that keeps crop yields from collapsing. For most of its history potash traded like any bulk commodity, priced by supply and demand and ignored by everyone who did not farm. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and a rock nobody thought about became something governments worry about.

The company at the centre of that shift is Nutrien, the Saskatoon-based producer that is the world’s largest supplier of crop nutrients. It controls roughly a fifth of global potash capacity, with weight in nitrogen and phosphate besides, and its 2025 results, net earnings of US$2.3 billion on record potash sales volumes, reflect a market that has tightened in its favour. Nearly half its potash ore is now cut by automated machines, a quiet edge that keeps it among the lowest-cost producers on Earth. Its 2026 guidance points to more of the same.

Why a fertilizer firm became a security story

The date that changed Nutrien’s strategic position is 2022. Russia and Belarus together supplied close to 40 per cent of the world’s potash before the war; sanctions and disrupted exports knocked much of that offline, and buyers turned toward the largest producer sitting safely outside the conflict. Saskatchewan’s mines went from one source among several to something close to indispensable.

There is a policy oddity in the tail of this. Canada has never formally designated potash a critical mineral under its own national-security framework, even though the strategic value of the thing is precisely what the war exposed. Ottawa markets the security value of its minerals abroad while leaving off its own list the one that literally feeds the world.

The retail edge

What separates Nutrien from a pure miner is the last mile. It runs a retail network of roughly 2,500 farm-service centres across North America, Australia and Latin America, selling not only crop nutrients but seed, chemicals and agronomic advice straight to the farmer. That dual role, producing the input and standing at the counter where it is sold, gives it a hand on price and a direct read on demand that bulk producers lack. It is as much a farm-services company as a mining one, which is why its earnings hold up even when commodity prices wobble. Lately it has been trimming the edges, reviewing options for its phosphate business and winding down higher-cost nitrogen operations in Trinidad, the moves of a producer concentrating on where its advantage runs deepest, which is potash.

Feeding the world, and lowering its footprint

Nutrien’s long-term problem is the industry’s: making nitrogen is energy-intensive, and the world wants more food, not less. The company is investing in lower-carbon “green” ammonia and cleaner production on the bet that whoever squares food security with emissions will define the next era of the business. No fertilizer producer has solved it; few are better placed to try than the low-cost leader with the balance sheet to fund the work.

For now Nutrien sits in an enviable spot: the low-cost, politically stable supplier of a mineral the world cannot do without, at a moment that keeps reminding everyone how much that matters. The open question is not whether it profits from that. It is whether Canada ever decides that a company controlling a fifth of the world’s potash belongs in its national-security thinking, rather than only on its balance sheet.

Reading list

  • Nutrien full-year 2025 results and 2026 guidance
  • Rabobank fertilizer outlook (2026)
  • Canada’s Critical Minerals List and its treatment of potash
  • IFPRI and WEF analyses of fertilizer-market geopolitics (2026)