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Copper Hits Record Highs While Fertilizer Costs Squeeze US Farmers - Materials Weekly - Week of September 6, 2026

Materials Weekly for the week of September 6, 2026. Copper set record highs near seven dollars a pound as a dozen podcasts argued the shortage is only in its first inning, a Department of Energy official flagged that the US has three copper smelters against 42 China built in a decade, tungsten went up roughly ten times, and about 7 in 10 US crop farmers could not afford all the fertilizer they needed.

Materials Weekly

Week of September 6, 2026: Copper Hits Record Highs While Fertilizer Costs Squeeze US Farmers

Materials Weekly: metals, critical minerals and ag inputs. Week of August 30 to September 6, 2026. Everything below comes from podcasts published in the last seven days.

Hi all,

What a difference a week makes. Copper was everywhere. A dozen shows, from junior-mining interviews to Bloomberg to a sitting U.S. Department of Energy official, circled the same story. The metal keeps grinding to record highs, and a growing chorus argues we are only in the "first inning" of a decade-long shortage.

But this issue is not just a copper love-in. There is a real debate about what happens to copper if the AI data-center boom cools. There is a quiet but important story about America's dependence on China for the obscure metals that go into weapons and magnets. And there is a genuinely painful story out in farm country, where the cost of diesel and fertilizer is squeezing growers hard. Let's dig in.

TL;DR (the 30-second version)

  • Copper hit record highs (~$6.60-$7.00 a pound) and the bull case got louder. The pitch: mines are old, ore is getting poorer, new mines take 15-25 years to build, and demand from electric grids, electric cars and AI data centers keeps climbing. 10-Minute Contrarian, The David Lin Report
  • The one real copper debate: what if AI spending slows? Bulls say it barely matters (data centers are a small slice of copper demand); skeptics say a slowdown, plus any recession, could finally cap the run. The KE Report / Fletcher, The KE Report / Rubino
  • America's real weak spot isn't mining, it's processing. A DOE official noted the U.S. has plenty of copper rock but only three copper smelters, versus about 42 China built in a decade. Columbia Energy Exchange
  • Tungsten, an unglamorous but critical defense metal, is having a moment. Prices are up roughly 10x since early 2025, and a small company is racing to be the first U.S. producer since 2015. Stocks To Watch
  • Lithium is quietly turning up. Standard Lithium signed a 10-year supply deal with battery giant LG worth $1.5-2 billion, and says lithium prices started rising again late last year. The Global Lithium Podcast
  • Out on the farm, it hurts. Roughly 7 in 10 U.S. crop farmers couldn't afford all the fertilizer they needed this year, and farm bankruptcies just hit a six-year high, as diesel and fertilizer costs climb after the Iran conflict. The David Lin Report / Salatin, Closing Market Report

What's new this week

Copper made new records, and the commodity world noticed. Several shows put the price around $6.60 to $7.00 a pound, up roughly 45% over the past year on one desk's math, and up more than 50% year-to-date by another's. On The KE Report, commodity strategist Darrell Fletcher pegged copper at "$660" (that's 660 cents, or $6.60 a pound) and made a striking point about how the whole price floor has shifted up: "I've traded it almost $2.53, and $4 was a big spike. So now six is the norm right now." His forward curve, the market's own bet on future prices, is "contangoed," meaning traders are paying up for copper delivered later: "You only have to get into 27 [2027] to get into the sevens."

Zooming out, the same show's weekend hosts, Peter Boockvar and Dana Lyons, noted the Bloomberg Commodity Index closed at a 14-year high. Copper is testing records, zinc hit a multi-year high, and even farm commodities are joining in. Boockvar's framing: "We're in a commodity bull market... We've had years of underinvestment in oil and gas and certainly industrial metals, probably the most so."

A U.S. government official spelled out the real bottleneck, and it isn't the mine. In one of the most substantive episodes of the week, the Department of Energy's Audrey Robertson told Columbia Energy Exchange that AI dominance runs straight through copper: "Maintaining our absolute lead and dominance in AI is going to require more power. More power is going to require more copper." The problem is what happens after you dig it up. "Copper in this country, we have plentiful resources of actual raw rock... But we only have three copper smelters in this country. In the last decade, China's built 42." A smelter is the plant that turns raw ore into usable metal. Her blunt conclusion: "It doesn't matter if we have copper in the ground here if we can't turn it into a usable resource." She said the fix is partly new technology (a cleaner processing method called hydrometallurgy) and partly a more hands-on government, with equity stakes, loans and purchase guarantees, because rival countries run these industries as state-backed operations that "are not there operating on a profit margin," which she says has been "an intentional economic warfare around making them uneconomic."

Tungsten quietly went vertical. Tungsten is a metal most people never think about. It's the hardest metal on the periodic table and melts at 3,400°C, which is why it's used in armor-piercing munitions, jet-engine turbines and, increasingly, in the heat-heavy guts of data centers. On Stocks To Watch, American Tungsten CEO Ali Hadji laid out just how fast the price has moved: "When I joined the organization in April last year, tungsten was about $300 per tonne... Today, tungsten sits at $3,000 per tonne." China, he said, "continues to have a stranglehold on all of the tungsten production globally" and is now stockpiling its own output. There has been no U.S. tungsten producer since 2015. More on his plan below.

Lithium is showing the first green shoots after a brutal two-year slump. On The Global Lithium Podcast, Standard Lithium executives explained that they'd just signed a second big supply contract, a 10-year "take-or-pay" deal (the buyer commits to pay whether or not it takes the product) with LG Energy Solution, the largest battery maker outside China. They described the recent turn: "the price impetus that we saw in Q3, Q4 of last year and then really into Q1 of this year... tipped a lot of teams into, okay, we actually need to get something locked up." A telling detail on how the whole industry has changed its tune: "the industry made some off-take purchase commitments over the last five, six years that were a little bit more aspirational in nature... I think the off-takes are getting a little bit more real."

The debate: is copper unstoppable, or is this a top?

This is the one genuine argument worth your time this week, because nearly everyone agrees copper is going up. The disagreement is about what could stop it.

The bull case (loud and detailed):

The supply story is grim in a way bulls love. On 10-Minute Contrarian, the host walked through it: three of the world's biggest mines have hit trouble (a mudslide at Grasberg in Indonesia, shutdowns and an explosion in Chile hurting state miner Codelco, and Cobre Panama offline for over a year). Worse, the rock itself is getting poorer: "Since the year 2000, overall ore grades have been cut in half. It's gone from 1% ore grades worldwide all the way down to 0.5%." That means you dig twice as much dirt for the same copper. New mines are stuck in permitting and "don't even really produce copper for like 10 years."

On the demand side, electrification is the engine, and electric cars make the point vividly. Same show: a regular gas car uses about 23 kilograms of copper; a full battery electric car uses 83 kilograms, more than triple. His baseball metaphor: "We are probably in the late first, maybe early second inning of this whole thing."

The deepest version of the bull case came from Gianni Kovacevic on The David Lin Report, who has followed copper for 30 years. His core fact: "75% of all the copper that's fabricated into something is there to generate, transfer, utilize, and now store electrical energy." He sees the West going from about 22% "electrification of final energy" today to 30% within 6-7 years, and China from 30% now to 50% by 2040. On price, he thinks copper is not even expensive yet in real terms: "We had copper in 2011 at $4.50... if copper in 2011 was $4.50 a pound, maybe today it should be $10 a pound." Nick Campbell, now CEO of Phoenix Metals, made the same $10 call on Commodity Culture, stressing it takes "usually like 25 years to develop from discovery to getting a large copper deposit into production," so "the supply response is probably 10, 15 years away."

The important counterpoints (there are real ones):

What if AI capex slows? This is the crux. On The KE Report, the host pushed Fletcher directly: when the data-center building boom slows, "will that be almost a top for the copper market?" Fletcher acknowledged "there's logic to that argument" on the demand side, but argued the supply problems mean "the floors are completely different" than in past cycles, so any sell-off would be shallow. Separately, John Rubino on the same network warned copper "remains cyclical and vulnerable to recession risk if AI spending slows," even as he agreed miners are throwing off huge cash right now. (link)

The "it's just a puppet of the AI story" pushback. Interestingly, the copper bulls themselves downplay AI as the main driver. Kovacevic argued data centers add maybe a fraction of a percentage point to demand: the real story is broad electrification. That's a subtle but important nuance. If the bull case doesn't actually rest on AI, then an AI slowdown may not be the killer some fear.

Aluminum is the natural pressure valve. Kovacevic made a point few others do: when copper gets too pricey, industry substitutes cheaper aluminum for less-demanding jobs (though copper stays essential for thick cables and high-power uses). He puts the ratio at "three and a half to four to one," which effectively caps how far copper can run before buyers switch. So "don't listen to people that tell you we're going to run out of copper."

And the plain old technical warning. The 10-Minute Contrarian host, himself a bull, flagged that respected commentator Mike McGlone keeps warning that after a run this steep, "you are bound to see a pullback." His own reading: any pullback is likely "temporary." He also debunked a scary-looking data point, that COMEX copper inventories are at record highs. That's not new supply flooding in, he explained; it's the U.S. hauling copper in from around the world to get ahead of tariffs: "We just took copper from other places and moved it into the trading market."

The tie-in to tariffs: Multiple shows noted the U.S. has formally labeled copper a "critical mineral" and is pursuing a "Section 232" tariff (a national-security trade tool). On Liz Thomas's podcast, the guest strategist described the resulting distortion: copper is draining from the London market (LME) into the U.S. (COMEX) and into Asia, leaving "a very tight market." Brew Markets flagged a possible 2027 U.S. tariff on refined copper as further upside pressure. (link)

The names in play

Specific companies and tickers that came up this week, with the context:

  • BHP and Teck Resources ($TECK). The 10-Minute Contrarian host owns both as his preferred "big miner" copper plays and flagged the timing: Teck's merger with Anglo American, creating "Anglo-Teck," was set to go through around September 9, with Teck holders receiving 1.33 shares of the new company for each Teck share. (link)
  • Freeport-McMoRan and BHP (again), on M&A. Fletcher's point is that big miners are buying growth rather than building it: "You're seeing a lot of M&A activity in the copper space as opposed to trying to organically grow or start new mines... it's just an easier move to make." (link)
  • American Tungsten ($TUNG / $TUNGF). The clearest single-name story of the week. CEO Ali Hadji plans to restart Idaho's IMA mine and, first, reprocess about 300,000 tons of surface tailings (leftover material from old mining) for just $5 million of upfront cost, targeting $45-75 million of revenue over about two years. The bigger resource: 2.5 million tons at 0.55% grade, "the highest-grade tungsten resource ever reported in the United States." He says the company has $51 million in the bank, a letter of intent with the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and offtake talks with all three North American tungsten processors. A full 500-ton-per-day plant would supply 8% of U.S. tungsten. (link)
  • Standard Lithium + LG Energy Solution. The LG deal covers, with an earlier contract, about 80% of Standard Lithium's planned Southwest Arkansas output; management calls the project "bankable" and is aiming for a final investment decision (FID) this fall. LG also just opened a $2 billion battery plant in Lansing, Michigan. (link)
  • The ETF shorthand people used: CPER (tracks the copper price itself), COPX / COPJ / ICOP (baskets of copper-mining stocks), DBB (a base-metals basket: copper, aluminum, zinc, lead, nickel), and REMX (rare earths plus strategic metals like antimony and tungsten). A recurring technical observation: the copper price (CPER) keeps making higher highs, but the miner ETFs "haven't really tracked the copper price the same way," so the stocks are lagging the metal. (Boockvar & Lyons)
  • African Rainbow Minerals (ARM). On The Money Show, profit rose 19% to R3.2 billion as platinum-group metals recovered; a platinum project was cited at R15.2 billion of capital spend and a 28% projected return. Context for the U.S.: South Africa's platinum is its single largest export to America.
  • Ex-Im-backed critical-minerals names dropped in passing: Perpetua Resources (a $2.5 billion Export-Import Bank agreement) and Chilean Cobalt ($375 million), cited by the American Tungsten CEO as examples of Washington now writing big checks for domestic supply. (link)

Read-throughs (what one story means for another)

  • The magnet vulnerability is the whole ballgame in U.S.-China talks. On RenMac, a political strategist explained why this spring's big tariff push collapsed in about eight days: China retaliated by choking off the critical minerals and magnets that U.S. carmakers need. "The CEOs of every car company called Trump and said, the Chinese aren't going to send me what I need and my plant's going offline." The result was the so-called "Busan Truce." The read-through: critical minerals aren't a niche mining theme, they're America's revealed pressure point, which is exactly why the DOE, Ex-Im Bank and Pentagon are suddenly funding domestic tungsten, gallium and cobalt. It also helps explain the tailwind under names like American Tungsten and Perpetua.
  • The energy crisis is quietly an everything-costs-more story. The same Middle East disruption pushing up oil and diesel is feeding straight into farm costs and mining costs. Diesel is a major line item for running mines and hauling ore, and Fletcher noted 2027 diesel futures hit an all-time high, one reason mining expansion is so expensive and copper supply stays tight. So the oil story and the copper-supply story are connected.
  • Copper's stock-vs-metal gap is a flag worth watching. If the metal keeps making records but the miner ETFs lag (as Boockvar and Lyons pointed out), it suggests investors aren't yet fully believing the miners will convert high prices into durable profit, or that costs (diesel, labor, poorer ore) are eating margins. Either way, it's a tell that the "easy" part of this trade may already be priced into the metal.
  • Labor is a shared constraint across the whole buildout. Standard Lithium flagged that competition for skilled construction workers "from LNG, from data centers" is "very real and is happening." That's the same labor pool the copper smelters, battery plants and every AI data center need. Rising build costs are a headwind for all of it.

What changed vs last week

  • Copper moved to center stage. Last week copper was a technical chart story; this week it's a full-blown, multi-podcast supercycle debate with a real bear counterpoint (AI slowdown plus recession risk).
  • Critical minerals got specific. This week brought a sitting DOE official on the smelter gap, a detailed tungsten restart story, and a clear explanation of how magnets became the lever in U.S.-China negotiations.
  • Battery metals came back into focus. Last week nickel was the battery-metal mention. This week there's a concrete lithium data point, the LG offtake, and a credible "prices are turning" narrative.
  • Fertilizer and ag inputs turned genuinely negative for farmers. New this week: roughly 70% of U.S. crop farmers couldn't afford all their fertilizer for 2026 (a farm-bureau survey of ~5,700 producers), Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies at a six-year high (62 in April, up 130% year-over-year), and University of Illinois budgets showing 2027 returns still below the ~$100-an-acre, 25-year average despite better crop prices, with fertilizer and fuel the culprits, tied to the Iran conflict. (Salatin, Closing Market Report)
  • Steel and aluminum moved on trade policy rather than company news. The most concrete data points were aluminum's "Midwest Premium" surcharge falling about 4% on U.S.-Canada trade wobbles, and hot-rolled-coil steel being volatile but "net flat." (Fletcher)