The Regenerative Agriculture Edition

On Strait-trapped fertilizer, contingency planning, and Potato Head Seminyak.

Photo by Bent Van Aeken on Unsplash

Colin here. The shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz has mostly been told in barrels of oil. But it is also a story about food. Roughly a third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer trade moves through the strait. The Gulf produces nearly half of all urea and 30 percent of ammonia. Urea has surged by half or more since the war began, and farmers from Iowa to Sri Lanka are recalculating their inputs in real time. The chemical fertilizer supply chain that has powered global yields since the 1960s has been revealed, again, as a fragile, energy-dependent system routed through chokepoints that no farmer controls.

Nowhere does that fragility hit harder than on islands. In Bali, tourism is worth an estimated $20 to $25 billion a year—the bulk of the local economy—and it has steadily reshaped agriculture in its own image. Over the past few decades, farmers have shifted from traditional methods to chemical inputs in pursuit of speed, predictability, and yield. The bill has come due in soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and a food culture increasingly disconnected from place. Farmers have become quiet custodians of generational knowledge with no obvious way to monetize it.

Why is this interesting?

At Desa Potato Head in Seminyak, the hospitality group has spent the past two years trying to reverse this. The hotel buys produce directly from local farmers transitioning back to natural methods, paying them through the multi-year period when soil regenerates and yields are unstable—typically three years or more. No intermediaries, no auctions, a guaranteed offtake at a fair price. The initiative is notable for its systems thinking: it is precisely the unstable transition window that kills most regenerative experiments, because farmers cannot absorb the income gap.

So far, more than 374 hectares have moved back to organic systems through the collective. As volumes scale, the plan is to open the supply to other businesses on the island, widening access to organic produce well beyond a single hotel’s kitchens. Alongside this, the team works with long-standing organic farmers and foragers, focusing on native produce and Balinese food culture increasingly sidelined by imports and industrial agriculture.

The next move is closing the loop. A new partnership from the Sweet Potato Project Foundation together with the existing Community Waste Project will route organic waste from the hotel and its partners into compost destined for the same farms whose produce feeds the kitchens. Inputs and outputs fold into a circle that does not require a single sack of urea to clear the strait.

The fertilizer shock will eventually pass. But the structural lesson—that hospitality businesses can quietly reshape the agricultural economies they sit on top of—will not.

Most coverage of the Hormuz closure tracks tankers. This is about what happens three supply chains downstream, in a rice paddy in Seminyak, and who, unexpectedly, is doing something about it. (CJN)