The Brief

In March 2024, when the K-pop girl group NewJeans was awarded group of the year at Billboard's Women in Music event, the crew was presented the honor by the unlikeliest of advocates: country star Lainey Wilson, who hinted at the distance between their respective worlds and this rare opportunity to bridge them. "It's a place where a gal who grew up in a small farming community in Louisiana gets to shine a light on an incredible group of K-pop performers from halfway across the globe," she said, applause roaring out before the group's name was even spoken. Indeed, the prized pony of ADOR, a sub-label of the juggernaut K-pop company HYBE, had spent the previous year affirming itself as an exciting next step in the genre's evolution. Billboard felt like the perfect American institution to recognize this leap: The 2023 EP Get Up had made NewJeans only the second K-pop girl group to top the Billboard 200, after Blackpink. But as the group performed "Super Shy" and "ETA," Get Up's hits, the distance between the two units couldn't have been more apparent. Blackpink was the final benchmark of an old K-pop model; NewJeans was a brand new one.

For one thing, there was a profound understatement to the NewJeans performance — members gliding in and out of the lead spot with uncanny precision, distinct from the flamboyant mini-showcases that had come before. The sparkling fits, flowy choreo and muted music were impressive on their own, but the rush was in how seamlessly they worked together, telling a story about style. Where many K-pop groups spend their press runs trying to be all things to all listeners, NewJeans had spent its breakout year building an aesthetic niche to live in. Where some K-pop singles are so obsessed with now-ness that they feel out of time the moment they're born, NewJeans' songs seemed to be angling for something timeless. For a moment, it looked as if the group could be K-pop's future — if not a bellwether then at least a new barometer, and a message to the industry to reconsider how it does business. Yet only a month after the Billboard ceremony, that horizon became clouded in uncertainty: A power struggle erupted within HYBE for control of NewJeans' future, benching the group for over a year and dividing its fanbase. A surprise announcement this month promises that NewJeans will be back, but the long absence leading to this unsteady return has felt, to those paying attention to the genre's scandals over the years, like the latest evidence of a lingering rot.

Even many superfans will tell you that K-pop's pageantry has often masked a troubled business model, where impressionable young trainees commit to a life run entirely by their agencies. Signing on the dotted line can come with extraordinary expectations: plastic surgery, disordered eating, heavy restrictions on socializing. South Korea's Fair Trade Commission finally capped K-pop contracts at seven years after a 2009 controversy around the boy band TVXQ, who coined the term "slave contract" to describe its own 13-year agreement. K-pop was also at ground zero for the rise of toxic stan culture, from the doxxing of journalists to the cyberbullying of artists; one such star, Sulli of the girl group f(x), died by suicide in the midst of unrelenting harassment. Concerns over these practices have been a public talking point for years, but reform efforts rarely stick: In 2019, Yang Hyun-suk, co-founder of YG Entertainment, was forced to step down from the label after threatening a whistleblower to cover up a drug allegation facing one of his artists; he has since returned to YG and is helming the girl group Babymonster.

The industry famous for its finely honed artist development method, sometimes called the "K-pop formula," has always lived with this tension: a creative philosophy with proven results, and a near-constant struggle for fairer relations between performers and the adults who oversee them. The latest and most public installment in this fight began last spring, with an outlier act suddenly at the center of the story.

In April 2024, NewJeans found itself caught in a quarrel between two corporate masters. On one side stood the top brass at HYBE, the largest of the country's "big four" entertainment agencies since it went public in 2020. On the other was one of their deputies: Min Hee-jin, CEO and founder of ADOR, who had launched NewJeans in 2022 and served as a creative director for its music. An industry veteran by the time she joined HYBE in 2019, Min had arrived touting progressive ideas for managing talent, already positioning her next group as an alternative to K-pop's star system. HYBE had given her the keys, but now alleged that an internal audit revealed she sought to seize total control of ADOR — and took steps to fire her. Min denied such a thing was possible, and claimed the falling-out actually stemmed from her complaints that the company had sidelined NewJeans, stifling its growth in favor of other girl groups it was launching. That August, ADOR announced Min had stepped down as CEO, while the producer insisted she had been forced out.

When asked, in an interview with the English-language newspaper Korea JoongAng Daily, why she and NewJeans were so committed to working together, Min attributed the closeness to her unique style of artist development, saying:

Throughout the ordeal, the five members of NewJeans — Minji (now 21), Hanni (21), Danielle (20), Haerin (19) and Hyein (17) — publicly supported Min and called for her reinstatement, saying they would not continue without her. HYBE suggested a compromise: Min could stay on, but in a limited role as a music producer, an offer Min quickly denounced as a mockery of her mission. "It is contradictory to accuse me of breach of trust while offering me a producer role. I chose to join because HYBE claimed they wanted to create a new wave and flow in K-pop. If those aspects hadn't been guaranteed, I wouldn't have even joined the company," she said in an interview with Japan's TV Asahi/ANN News program News Station. The only tenable way forward, she argued, was for her to continue as CEO, managing business and production in tandem.

By then, the issue had grown bigger than Min, with the NewJeans girls voicing their own criticisms of the parent company. Last September, in an impromptu YouTube livestream that played like a hostage video, the members called HYBE inhumane, detailing mistreatment and harassment. A month later, Hanni testified, through tears, before the South Korean National Assembly's Environment and Labor Committee, as a reference witness for an audit being conducted around workplace harassment and artist protection in the entertainment industry. She spoke about discrimination she and her groupmates faced at HYBE, and the resulting distrust. The case was ultimately dismissed, with the committee ruling that members of K-pop groups are not workers, and therefore are not entitled to labor protections.

Finally, on Nov. 28, 2024, NewJeans took matters into its own hands. At a press conference, the members announced the termination of their exclusive contract with ADOR, and vowed to seek the right to continue independently under the NewJeans name. The industry moved swiftly against them, with the Korea Management Federation and Korea Entertainment Producers' Association both siding with the company, the latter calling the act childish. Attempts to freelance under a new name, NJZ, were quickly thwarted. The group performed for the last time in February 2025, headlining at ComplexCon Hong Kong.

It took a year of legal limbo, with the group's musical activities stopped cold, before a pair of decisions put an end to the suspense. On Oct. 30, 2025, Seoul Central District Court ruled in favor of ADOR, saying that NewJeans must honor its contract and stay with the label through 2029. The members initially stuck to their guns, saying in a statement, "It is impossible to return to ADOR and continue normal entertainment activities under the current situation where the trust relationship with ADOR has completely broken down." They vowed to appeal the ruling, a case legal experts estimated would not be heard until well into 2026. Then came a twist that few saw coming: On Nov. 12, ADOR announced in a press release that the group's two youngest members, Hyein and Haerin, would be returning to the label, with no word on Minji, Danielle and Hanni. A few hours later, the three holdouts announced their intention to return as well — but through a news article, saying they had contacted ADOR but had not yet heard back. The label's response was a reluctant one: "We are confirming the authenticity of their intentions."

That abrupt, staggered homecoming may be the perfect distillation of the conflicting ideologies that have swirled around the group from all sides. Local reports claimed that Hyein's father — who had so strongly opposed their leaving the label that he entered a civil dispute with his wife over legal guardianship, citing a need for an "environment where Hyein could focus on her career" — was instrumental in bringing the younger girls back to ADOR. In contrast, The Korea Herald reported that Minji's mother had been a vocal supporter of Min and her position in the fight with HYBE. Meanwhile, Min herelf had moved on, announcing the start of her own indie agency just ahead of the court verdict. But she did release a statement giving her blessing for the group's return to ADOR, with the parting wish that they remain united. "I can begin anew anywhere. But I believe that NewJeans must remain whole as five," Min said. "I hope the members grow stronger and become an even better NewJeans, and above all, I wish happiness for all five members."

The end of Min's label experiment points to something bigger at play, a tug-of-war that has long felt inescapable within K-pop. During the peak of the dispute, HYBE and the courts asserted there would be no disruption to the NewJeans operation under the proposed changes. But Min had intentionally designed ADOR, a boutique imprint with NewJeans as its only artist, to run counter to the HYBE system, binding artists' and producers' fates together in ways frankly radical for the genre. "I wanted to have all of these come together," Min told Fast Company, describing the balance of art and commerce that made up her fantasy K-pop outfit. "My definition of cool music, with my definition of a cool picture, with my definition of a great business. Business is, of course, important because if you don't make money with art, it would be kind of useless."

Before launching ADOR, Min was one of the defining figures in K-pop aesthetics. As the creative director at SM Entertainment, she styled and designed concepts for Girls' Generation, SHINee, EXO, f(x) and Red Velvet, becoming the highest-paid woman in the industry in the process. "I accomplished a lot of things when I was at SM, and I left because I was not really satisfied with my life there," she told Fast Company. "But I'm not saying that I came here because I love this company; I needed a place where I could actualize my vision." The ADOR way — which is to say, the NewJeans blueprint — was to defy what Min called "conventional K-pop idol grammar" and create a group for non-fanatics: a smooth, iterative sound that never resolves, snappy enough to generate earworms yet compact enough to not overstay its welcome.

"For most K-pop songs, there's always an intro and then the climax and the tension relieves again, because people think that having loops is boring," Min said in that interview. She was specifically referencing NewJeans' club-pop confection "Super Shy," which artfully defies this climax-release principle by converting liquid drum and bass into blissful Powerpuff pizzazz. The song was co-written and -arranged by the Danish singer-songwriter Erika de Casier, and is imbued with her soft-focused, nostalgic take on Y2K-era R&B. In it, you can hear the NewJeans model at full bore: loopy, sugar-rush songcraft accented by airbrushed vocals. But most important is its holism: It is streamlined, even graceful, where many other K-pop recordings feel like Megazord constructions of the myriad artists who work on them. (EXO-K's "History," for example, has two different bridges, one of which feels beamed in from a completely different song.)

The fragmented approach can be its own kind of endearing, but stitching together bits of tracks was not Min's way. "There is a reason why we have composers make the songs! Sometimes, we'll adjust the top line, but we never go as far as to damage the real intention of the song," she said. Min's production MO was pointed defiantly away from the tried and true way of doing things, which took some collaborators by surprise. "One of the first questions they asked me was, 'Do you listen a lot to K-pop?' " de Casier told GQ in 2023. "And I got so nervous and I had to be honest and said, 'No, I haven't yet explored that genre.' And they're like, 'Good, because we want something new. We want something fresh.' "

K-pop can often sound oddly anachronistic, even when aiming at an explicitly retro sound, but NewJeans spun a mirage of the past into a modern teenage dream. The touchstones weren't unique ('90s streetwear, early aughts American prep, teen dramas), nor were the genres at play (new jack swing, synth-pop, Jersey and Baltimore club, Miami bass, throwback R&B); it was the ways in which they were remixed, the sense of curation and harmony at work and the way it all slotted neatly into a TikTok-induced optimization. A lot has been made of NewJeans' minimalism as a refreshing counter to K-pop maximalism, but the real innovation was its sepia-toned feel: K-pop as a moodboard come alive, revitalizing the old to the point of a full revolution. Some portion of that has to be attributed to the impresario-auteur at the reins and her master plan. "These days people use the word producer kind of interchangeably as a composer. I'm a producer, but I don't make songs," Min said. "I plan strategies."

It is only through such acumen that you get the synergy of a dot-com-era obsessive like de Casier calibrating the group's filter for maximum effect. She is far from the first inspired pairing of choice Westerner and ascendant K-pop group — the late SOPHIE produced for ITZY; Carly Rae Jepsen co-wrote an f(x) song; Troye Sivan and Charli XCX worked on music for the giants BTS and TWICE, respectively — but in many of those songs you can often feel the discord of trying to force those artists to adapt to the agencies' market-tested structure. So much of the NewJeans synthesis came from those brought onto the creative team having no clue how K-pop usually works. "It's hard [for me] to say how their music differs from other K‑pop songs — I think it's better for music critics to comment on that," Ylva Dimberg, one of the group's recurring writers and producers, told The Face. The primary NewJeans producer, 250, put forth a theory of K-pop music that seemed to align with the group's mandate: He asked a Swedish friend who headed a K-pop songwriting team what K-pop was, because he didn't really know, and the friend said it could be anything. "People talk about 'the formula of K-pop.' But I don't really understand that, because K-pop is really just pop music made by Koreans," he told Nylon. "So whatever we do, we don't need to follow any specific rules because no one can tell us something we made isn't K-pop."

Not following rules seems to be precisely the strategy Min envisioned. To 250's point, the idea of a genre as omnivorous as K-pop having a central sound is ridiculous, but a unique song framework can still stand out. Most NewJeans songs don't have bridges; none have obligatory rap verses. All feel like they have been stripped to their essential parts, stringing hooks together like embroidery floss along a friendship bracelet, and all have a perfect grasp on the balance between Western and Eastern pop sensibilities. Much of that equilibrium seems to begin with the sessions themselves and the collaborators put in the room: a marriage between outsiders from the Korean industry and niche Scandinavian artists, adding up to an unfussy fusionist's phantasmagoria.

It should be said: While ADOR's anti-system stance paid off handsomely as a creative ethic, it proved less effective in remaking the industry at the administrative level. Min was never a K-pop socialist — revolutionary by industry standards, certainly, but still longed to be a CEO fronting a business — and in time she inevitably found herself playing by the house rules, subject to the same industry politicking as other K-pop executives. (Among the evidence cited in October's court ruling were unearthed Slack messages from Min ordering subordinates to dig up dirt on other HYBE artists, which the court saw as grounds to declare breach of trust, misuse of personal information, infringement of trade secrets, defamation and abuse of power.) No one person could overhaul the entire enterprise, but Min's undoing feels like an especially revealing lesson in the limits of the master's tools.

K-pop is a copycat league. Not just in the musical sense — as when Girls' Generation ripped Duffy's "Mercy" for its own "Dancing Queen," or when myriad K-pop groups followed the success of "Despacito" down the reggaeton rabbit hole — but also in its efforts to recreate the tactics of anything that brings in audiences (hence "the K-pop formula," which is about replicating the paces of idol assembly down to the members' roles). The space vacated by NewJeans has been tough to fill, but that doesn't mean there haven't been one-off attempts to take a few laps in its lane. In Illit, a HYBE sister group whom Min accused of ripping off NewJeans wholesale, you can hear the same collage-like principle on songs like "Magnetic" and "jellyous." Olivia Marsh, the literal sister of NewJeans' Danielle, tunes her "Strategy" to a similar turn-of-the-millenium frequency. Several songs, from ifeye's "IRL" and HITGS' "SOURPATCH" to VIVIZ's "Full Moon" and izna's "BEEP," have tried to recreate the bubblegum bass vibe of skipping rhythms and lush, light vocals; even TWICE got in on the fun last year. Others, like Hearts2Hearts' "Blue Moon" and RESCENE's "Deja Vu," conjure the dreamy, rosy-eyed R&B-lite. All of these attempts are serviceable; many are even pleasant. But none quite recreate the mojo.

The contrast is, at least partly, in the roadmap. Min made an organizational practice of stockpiling good, complete songs and figuring out what to do with them later, whereas the traditional K-pop process involves building an elaborate concept around a plug-and-play single and treating it as a peg for months of extended rollout activities. NewJeans didn't do isolated campaigns or tossed-off B-sides; everything served the broader group architecture, something not to be taken for granted in K-pop's LARPing ecosystem, where artists transform between promo cycles. (Just look at the jarring transition from LE SSERAFIM's posed, subtle, disco-inflected "Hot" to the campy, lurid, rap-forward "Spaghetti.") Min once said that the music itself was the concept with NewJeans, and simple as that seems, it's a key part of the group's appeal: There was an identifiable and qualifiable NewJeans sound, one that was singular and exclusive. It was clear what a New Jeans song was, and — just as crucially — what it wasn't, to the point of feeling intuitive. The group did all of the things inherent to K-pop groups, but it did so with a sense of taste top of mind.

The worst K-pop can feel like bad product placement: odious in its lack of subtlety, putting the commerce front and center and pretending otherwise, treating its "idols" like collectible dolls to generate shareholder value. It would be disingenuous to suggest that NewJeans was in any way immune to the genre's hazards of investment opportunity or marketing front — the video for "ETA" is an ad for the iPhone 14 Pro — but the group's promotion was far less gauche; it was purposeful, even, and shrewd in its movements. It was the influencer ideal: the mere presence doing much of the selling, of a vibe more than a commodity. There was a naturalness, at odds with the usual K-pop posturing, and the styling and choreography were in complete alignment with the music, which was clearly the main attraction. That is, perhaps, why this battle feels particularly distressing in an industry that is no stranger to scandal and corporate malpractice. It is disorienting for K-pop's most actualized act to become the face of its dysfunction.

It's impossible to say whether this is the beginning of the end for NewJeans. Perhaps, years from now, Min Hee-jin's dismissal will feel like the official death knell — or maybe it will be a blip in an otherwise successful career at ADOR. But it's also tempting to think of the what-ifs — the artistic and workplace breakthroughs that could have been made at the key turning points of this saga. What might the NewJeans arc have been had it continued uninterrupted, and could it have ushered in a new K-pop paradigm, or at least an alternative to the norm? What might the business look like had the Environment and Labor Committee heard Hanni's testimony as an elegy, a plea to bury the old ways? Min once mused, "It can be scary to suggest something different. But once the suggestion is accepted, I think that's what writes new history." Before us now is the other side of that coin: the suggestion rejected, the door closed on renewal, and a group once defined by its counterculture ethos headed back to the assembly line, to resume performing as though nothing has changed. K-pop is reliant on a blissful suspension of disbelief, the stage as a whimsical little pocket world — but it's hard to imagine the many layers of strained relationships here won't taint the NewJeans fantasy in ways that cannot be ignored.

In a recent interview with the Associated Press, SM Entertainment founder Lee Soo-man — Min's former boss and a key player in K-pop's global expansion — was asked his thoughts on the genre's darker controversies, from which his own company had scarcely been immune. (Recall TVXQ's "slave contract" controversy and Sulli's suicide — both SM artists.) Lee responded with another question: "Should we always weigh the dark side equally with the bright side, the future?" he asked. "Media should consider whether K-pop represents more future or more past that holds us back. Rather than just discussing the dark side and dragging us down by clinging to the past, shouldn't we talk more about the future?" I've been thinking about that a lot since I read it. It's a question premised on the idea that the past and future are partitioned from each other, and that the darkness is all in the rearview mirror. Yet if the NewJeans gauntlet is any indication, those tribulations are still far closer to us than they appear.

A room on the second floor of a Camarillo building is quickly filling with smoke. From the far end of the room, flames start to shoot across the ceiling.

While the flames and smoke are real, the danger is not.

This is the Ventura County Fire Department’s new Live Fire Training Complex. A firefighter is controlling the flames and smoke with what looks like a TV remote control.

The $32 million project includes live fire training buildings, a dedicated ladder training prop, and other facilities designed to give firefighters hands-on experience.

"This complex has a 'Class A' combustible burn building, which we are standing in now," said Ventura County Fire Department Training Chief Casey Rosdaile. "The 'Class B' building is propane-fed. This building allows us to train in real fire conditions and real fire behavior. That building (the 'Class B' building) allows us to do a lot more of the operational steps. There's always a gap between the simulated thing and a real thing, and we're trying to limit that as much as possible. That way, when someone trains, they aren't going to be the real thing and say that it's nothing like they practiced."

The buildings are made of concrete, so they won't be affected by the flames and smoke. The smoke kind that's used on movie shoots, so it doesn't leave clothing with the smoky smell like you get from a brush fire.

He added that the new facilities can help train firefighters, as well as other first responders, on ways to deal with a number of emergencies.

"These buildings can host anything from sheriff's operations to (simulated) structure fires, to search and rescue," said Rosdaile. "There are a million things you can do in here. You can train 50 to 60 firefighters at a time, so it really gives us a lot of flexibility."

The two new buildings are just part of the fire department’s fire training complex. It covers 22 acres of land on the southeast side of Camarillo Airport. There are nearly 18,000 square feet of indoor training space, with 32 training rooms.

The dedicated live fire training buildings give firefighters experience with scenarios that were often difficult and time-consuming to create.

"We would light the materials, and let the fire conditions and environment build, to create a realistic training environment, and then send the folks in to extinguish it," said Ventura County Fire Chief Dustin Gardner. "Then, we would have to clean it all out, and reset it, and start again. We would get a couple of burns a day done. Now, we're getting multiple burns an hour."

Gardner said it's a complex they've sought to create for years.

"This facility allows us to close the gap between training and reality. This allows us to expose our firefighters to as realistic an environment as we can repetitively, and under safe conditions."

Among the props at the facility is a vehicle chassis equipped with gas lines, which can be ignited, so firefighters can practice fighting those types of fires.

"This is our vehicle prop, and it lets us simulate fire. We can push the fire to different parts of the vehicle, so we can set it in the interior, in the cab, the wheel well, as well as the engine compartment," said Ventura County Fire Department Quartermaster Jake Finley. "It creates a good learning environment, with teachable moments. You can see in the background some of the old vehicles (we used to burn salvaged vehicles), and it was a really intensive process. We couldn't repeat it as quickly."

While the Ventura County Fire Department owns and operates the facility, the goal is for it to be used to train first responders from throughout the region. It’s already hosted firefighters from a number of other agencies in the county, as well as teams from neighboring counties.

When the war with Iran started, one of the top economic concerns globally was the slowdown of oil shipments. But there was another critical export that got stuck in the region when hostilities began: fertilizer.

Before the war, around one-third of the world's fertilizer transported by sea passed through the Strait of Hormuz, according to UN Trade and Development. The waterway has become a shipping chokepoint in recent months.

With the strait closed, fertilizer shipments from the Persian Gulf slumped and prices rose, affecting countries all around the world that import fertilizer. The war also created a global shortage of natural gas, a key component in nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing.

It caused a massive headache for U.S. farmers who were hit with higher fertilizer prices and limited availability just as they were deciding what to plant for the upcoming growing season.

But the costs borne by farmers don't necessarily get passed on to consumers, and food system experts say they're unlikely to have a major impact on the retail prices of fruit and vegetables.

"Consumers are going to see higher food prices come September to January, once harvests start coming in, and the few months thereafter," said Chris Barrett, a professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University. "Very little of that is going to be directly attributable to fertilizer."

That's because food inflation is generally driven by larger factors affecting multiple parts of the food supply chain, such as fewer workers and high fuel costs.

US farmers are rethinking their plans

About one-third of the fertilizer used by U.S. farmers is imported, according to The Fertilizer Institute, an industry trade group. TFI Vice President of Public Affairs Christopher Glen said little of that comes through the Strait of Hormuz.

"But we get impacted in a big way because the fertilizer market is global," Glen said over email. "Even if those tons from the Mideast aren't coming to the US, they are still tons that have been removed from the market and need to be made up elsewhere. That's where the pressure comes from."

An American Farm Bureau Federation survey released in April reported that 70% of respondents said they couldn't afford all the fertilizer they needed this season.

Some farmers are more vulnerable to price swings than others. Producers of corn and wheat, which rely heavily on fertilizer, can spend around a third of their operating costs on fertilizer alone. Half of the farmers who responded to a survey released by the National Corn Growers Association in early April said they wouldn't apply the full amount of fertilizer to their corn crop this year, due largely to higher costs and limited availability.

Because farmers often secure their fertilizer stores well before a growing season begins, some weren't seriously affected by the price swings created by the war in Iran. (Iran said it closed the Strait of Hormuz shortly after it was attacked by the U.S. and Israel at the end of February. U.S. corn growing season typically begins in April.) But they are worried about the future: corn growers who responded to the survey were twice as concerned about the 2027 corn crop as they were about this year's.

This season, some farmers may opt to plant crops that require less nitrogen fertilizer than corn, such as soy beans, in response to rising costs.

According to USDA data, farmers are expected to plant 95.3 million acres of corn this year, down from 98.8 million acres last year. But the total acreage of soybeans is predicted to rise to 85.4 million acres this year from 81.2 million acres last year.

US grocery prices probably won't take a huge hit

If higher fertilizer costs lead to smaller harvests, that could contribute to modest retail price hikes. A TD Economics analysis estimated that a 2-5% production shortfall in North America could grow food inflation by around 0.1-0.5 percentage points in 2027.

Sponsor MessageBut experts say the costs of the fertilizer shortage will be largely shouldered by farmers.

The amount a farmer spends on fertilizer is a small fraction of the total cost to grow food and get it to grocery store shelves. Just 12 cents of every dollar U.S. consumers spend on food goes to farms, while the rest is received by transportation companies, processors, wholesalers and grocery stores, according to the USDA. And the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service reported that U.S. farms spent around 7% of their budgets on fertilizer, lime and soil conditioners in 2024 (though farmers growing crops more reliant on fertilizer such as corn would spend more).

Additionally, farmers don't have much bargaining power to negotiate with wholesalers for higher crop prices when their operating costs rise, according to Rob Vos, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. "Those buyers will go to other farmers to try and get it cheaper," he said.

But there are factors other than the fertilizer crunch that are more likely to cause food prices to jump. Barrett said the global food industry is facing a "really unpleasant layer cake" of pressures, from tariffs and extreme weather to higher prices on labor, fuel and fertilizer.

"No one of those by itself is especially painful," he said. "But when you add them all up, they become quite painful together."

In parts of Africa and Asia, the effects of the fertilizer shortage could be far worse. Jorge Moreira da Silva, Executive Director of the UN Office for Project Services, said in April that the reduction of shipments through the Strait of Hormuz may prove "very significant and severe" for poorer countries. Less-developed countries that rely heavily on fertilizer from the Persian Gulf include Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Somalia.

The fertilizer industry is recovering — and may adapt in the process

Some fertilizer prices have begun to fall again in recent weeks, after the U.S. and Iran reached a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz last month.

The Trump administration has also taken steps to lower fertilizer costs for American farmers. This week, Trump temporarily suspended "countervailing duties" on certain phosphate imports, which are added to some imported goods to cancel out subsidies provided by foreign governments.

Still, it will be a while before the fertilizer sector returns to normal. Vos estimated that it could take weeks or months for fertilizer manufacturing plants to come back online and return to previous production levels. If high prices stick around, that could snarl the plans of U.S. farmers preparing to plant cool-season crops this autumn, he added.

Barrett said the trouble with the fertilizer industry has also gotten farmers thinking about how they can protect themselves from these kinds of supply-chain disruptions in the future and looking for other ways to replenish their soil, such as manure, compost and cover crops.

"Just like we're seeing more people interested in electric vehicles because the price of gasoline and diesel has gone up, you see more farmers interested in other ways of replenishing soil nutrients as the price of fertilizer has gone up," he said.

A consequential act of defiance secured tea's place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America's colonial era.

The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.

But tea wasn't the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America's fight for independence.

Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.

As the United States celebrates 250 years, here's what to know about America's early history of coffee.

Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed

Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.

"The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower" in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.

"The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it," McDonald says. "A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century."

The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.

The Boston Tea Party probably wasn't the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim

On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.

Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.

The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government's passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.

To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It's why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father's now-famous letter.

In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.

" 'No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I'le make you Coffee.' Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better," Adams wrote.

Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.

She studied advertisements from the 1760s and '70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, "coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is."

A big reason? It was cheaper. "Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers."

Historians say it's hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.

And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.

"There is a vast amount of smuggling," says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. "So they're not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They're probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean."

And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren't always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. "I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company," she posits someone of the era saying. "But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee."

Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas 

In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.

"Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things," says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.

A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.

In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed "penny universities," Pendergrast says: "because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything." The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.

Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.

"There's a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it's because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather," historian McDonald says. "That's where they heard about the economics of the day."

Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers' horses. They were also more likely to have food.

Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.

But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could "riotously drink together" in taverns, coffeehouses often didn't allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.

"The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal," she says. "Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled."

Still, she says, the lines between the two "weren't completely clear."

The cost of America's revolutionary drink 

Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.

Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.

Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. "Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities," says Chaplin.

As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. "They're both becoming affordable luxuries," Chaplin says.

Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.

"These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff," says Chaplin. "The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world."

There's a dark side to coffee's history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world's coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.

The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that "all men are created equal," but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.

Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America's fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.

"Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought," Pendergrast says. "But it was also grown by slaves."

Wearing gloves and a KN95 mask, Emmanuel Carrera Ruedas hunkered down near a storm drain, just steps away from the smoldering Lineage warehouse fire, as he filmed himself pointing to what he described as insulation and foam flowing into the drain.

“The thing about this water is that it all gets dumped straight into the L.A. River,” Carrera Ruedas, of Cudahy, told his Instagram followers in a June 22 reel.

In the past two weeks, Carrera Ruedas has spent evenings gathering water samples outside Lineage and from the L.A. River as he and other community scientists are partnering with experts from UCLA and Columbia University to learn what’s in the runoff. Samples will soon be sent to a lab in New York.

“For far too long, the river has just been a drainage, a dumping site for companies,” said Carrera Ruedas, 27, who often encounters toads, birds and fish inhabiting its ecosystem.

“There is life in there,” he told Boyle Heights Beat. “We’re all in proximity to the river, and that’s kind of the vein that runs through the city that really connects us all.”

Community-led testing

Since the Lineage fire ignited June 17 in Boyle Heights, residents, environmental advocates and researchers have taken it upon themselves to find out what’s in the air and water. They’ve launched their own sampling efforts, seeking answers about what people have been breathing and contaminants that may have entered the L.A. River.

The community-led testing comes as residents have reported eye irritation, nausea and headaches while questioning whether the government has done enough to capture the fire’s environmental and public health impacts.

Those concerns are especially alarming in Boyle Heights, East L.A. and neighboring Southeast L.A. communities, where neighbors have long faced disproportionate pollution burdens.

Crews navigate around piles of debris and puddles of water on the eastern edge of the Lineage warehouse as they begin cleanup efforts on June 25, 2026.

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Andrew Lopez

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Boyle Heights Beat

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An estimated 31,700 workers, about 81% of whom are Latino, live in the county and city zones where a smoke advisory was issued, according to new data from the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute. They work in health care, manufacturing and food service industries. About half of the workers earn $3,333 or less a month, below L.A. County’s “very low income” threshold.

The area also experiences diesel pollution levels three times the county average, as well as higher rates of asthma and cardiovascular disease-related emergency department visits, according to UCLA. Nearly 10,000 households in the area lack air conditioning.

“This is not only an air quality emergency but also a worker and environmental justice issue,” UCLA said.

Behind the push for environmental justice

For years, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice has shed light on how Latinos on the Eastside often bear the brunt of the region’s pollution and climate disasters, such as the East L.A. oil spill in late May that dumped nearly 25,000 gallons of crude oil onto streets and into the L.A. River. For the organization, “We are just trying to breathe” is a common phrase.

“Something I’ve told many people over a long period of time is, ‘We’re not polar bears. We’re not whales.’ Nobody is coming to save us. We have to step up and defend ourselves,” said mark! Lopez with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice.

Antonia Castillo, 73, helps her grandson Aiden Velez put on a mask near their Boyle Heights home.

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Andrew Lopez

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Boyle Heights Beat

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East Yard members opted to take air samples themselves, dissatisfied with the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s assessment of the fire’s air-quality impacts. They placed sorbent tubes, which Lopez described as passive air monitors, outside nearby homes for about seven days. Soon, they’ll send the findings to a Columbia University lab with the help of UC Irvine.

What officials have done so far

South Coast AQMD said it conducted “mobile monitoring” during the first two days of the fire that found “significantly elevated concentrations” of particulate matter. The agency then deployed particulate matter monitors at Eastman Avenue Elementary and Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School that provide “near-real time exposure information.” AQMD noted that the L.A. Fire Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducted their own monitoring, while third-party contractor Onterris has continued monitoring during the cleanup phase.

AQMD also observed smoke impacts throughout the region, issuing a particle pollution advisory in English and Spanish that remained in effect through June 24.

What's next and lingering questions

Meanwhile, Lopez said more sampling is necessary, and he questioned the effectiveness of efforts by Lineage, AQMD and LAFD. He and other advocates criticized public statements from officials, including Mayor Karen Bass’ assurances that “the air is not dangerous,” even as residents were reporting feeling sick. He also took aim at LAFD Chief Jaime Moore’s statements that ammonia was not toxic to individuals unless they had respiratory issues or came in direct contact with it. East Yard also called for evacuations in the area.

“It feels like at the city and county level they don’t currently have the capacity to really handle this situation,” Lopez added. “I think it really requires state and federal intervention to make sure that the cleanup and restoration isn’t mismanaged.”

Yoshira “Yoshi” Ornelas Van Horne, an exposure scientist and assistant professor with the UCLA Fielding School’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, said the Lineage fire is exposing how little is done to “respond to public health emergencies and disasters” in communities like Boyle Heights and East L.A., areas “that have so often been referred to as environmental injustice communities.”

Residents and community organizations like East Yard, Ornelas Van Horne said, “are always the ones having to respond.”

“They’re relying on each other. They’re relying on their networks and their organizing power to be able to do that on the ground sampling.”

Ornelas Van Horne reached out to colleagues at Columbia’s Multi-Element Trace Analysis Laboratory in New York after she learned of the sampling taking place and of community concerns about the runoff making its way down to the L.A. River.

Those samples will be analyzed for heavy metals like cadmium, lead and arsenic, she said.

The L.A. County Public Works Department, according to the Los Angeles Times, deployed three containment booms on the L.A. River and continued to monitor the water as it made its way to the ocean.

Carrera Ruedas began collecting water samples on the third day of the fire. He said he took the first sample from the L.A. River, about 100 meters from the spout where it spilled out. The second was taken from outside Lineage. He has amassed dozens of samples since then.

Cudahy sits alongside the lower L.A. River, and after the fire, Carrera Ruedas recalled a “heavy stench that affected people in our community.” The trash he saw in the river was the foam and insulation that came from Lineage, he said.

“It really pissed me off, just to see all this trash go in there and nobody doing anything about it,” said Carrera Ruedas, who also serves as the parks and environmental justice commissioner for Cudahy.

The L.A. River, Carrera Ruedas said, is “part of our ecosystem.”

“This is not just affecting me. This affects everybody else around me. This affects people who love the beach, people who just want our water systems clean,” he said.