You have probably noticed that food prices just keep going up at the grocery store. Many people believe that this is just a temporary phenomenon, and those people would be wrong. In fact, things are really going to start going haywire when a lot of the food that is supposed to be on our store shelves in 2023 doesn’t show up. Of course the reason that food isn’t going to be there is because it isn’t being grown in 2022. This summer, food production in the United States is constantly being slammed by one disaster after another. Sadly, most Americans still don’t understand that this is going to deeply affect all of us in the months ahead.
Let me start my discussion by talking about the endless drought that is scorching crops all over the western half of the nation.
At this point, it is becoming clear that corn and soybean yields will be way down in 2022…
Drought is shrinking crops from the US Farm Belt to China’s Yangtze River basin, ratcheting up fears of global hunger and weighing on the outlook for inflation.
The latest warning flare comes out of the American Midwest, where some corn is so parched stalks are missing ears of grain and soybean pods are fewer and smaller than usual. The dismal report from the Pro Farmer Crop Tour has helped lift a gauge of grain prices back to the highest level since June.
In one form or another, corn and soybeans are in thousands upon thousands of products that Americans consume on a daily basis.
If the supply of corn and soybeans is way down, that means that prices will be way up.
Anyone that has taken ECON 101 can figure that out.
Meanwhile, the drought is also taking a devastating toll on ranchers. Many of them have been selling off their herds while they still have something to sell, and that has helped keep short-term meat prices stable.
But the size of our national cattle herd just keeps getting smaller and smaller, and that is going to mean much higher beef prices in the years ahead…
In response, ranchers have been forced to sell their animals early, thinning the numbers of older cows. By some estimates, US beef-producing cattle herds could be slashed by up to 20% if the ranching industry gets rid of its older, calf-producing cows.
“The implications of fewer cows giving birth to calves are that over the next few years there will be higher beef prices,” said Peter Bozzo, vice president of Chef’s Warehouse, a food purveyor to high-end restaurants.
Sadly, those in the western half of the nation aren’t going to get any relief any time soon.
In fact, it is being reported that a sizzling heat wave will be baking the entire region throughout this week…
Some of the hottest temperatures of the year are on the way for the West Coast and possibly staying dangerously hot through Labor Day as a mega heat wave builds in for the long term.
More than 55 million people are currently under heat alerts from Southern California through the San Joaquin Valley and into portions of the Northwest, including 20 of the most populated cities up and down the West Coast.
“Temperatures could exceed 110F in parts of the Southwest, where an excessive heat warning is currently in effect,” the Weather Prediction Center wrote.
Meanwhile, we are witnessing historic flooding along the Mississippi River, and this will have a substantial impact on nearby agricultural production…
Portions of central Mississippi and the lower Mississippi Delta saw more than 1 foot of rain between Aug. 21 and 25, and flash flooding will affect some agricultural commodities in these areas.
At this point, nobody knows how extensive the damage is.
But what we do know is that some crops that were wiped out were literally just about to be harvested…
Numerous row-crop fields were saturated, and preliminary reports suggest that the crops most compromised will be early-planted cotton and soybeans that were nearly ready for harvest before the weather deteriorated.
Switching gears, fish are being killed in vast numbers by an algae bloom that has suddenly erupted along the west coast.
In fact, we are being told that this is the very first algae bloom that has ever been recorded in San Francisco Bay…
Environmental nonprofit San Francisco Baykeeper is reporting that an algae bloom is happening across the San Francisco Bay, something they believe is unprecedented in the history of the bay. Additionally, in the past week Baykeeper said it’s received an increasing number of reports of dead fish around the bay that the group suspects the algae bloom is to blame.
Baykeeper reported that hundreds of dead fish were visible Sunday at the Oakland Yacht Club. On Thursday, Baykeper reported dozens of fish in the middle of the bay between Dumbarton and San Mateo bridges.
Day after day, so many strange things are taking place.
Why do you think this is happening?
Lastly, I wanted to mention the fact that there has been yet another fire at a food production facility in the United States.
This time, it was a poultry business in Montebello, California…
A commercial fire burned a poultry business in Montebello Sunday afternoon.
QC Poultry at 1111 W. Olympic Blvd. sustained building damage, and several commercial vehicles may also have been burned, a spokesperson for the city of Montebello said.
Footage from the scene shows burn damage near the building’s windows and doors, as well as at least one unit from the Monterey Park Fire Department present to assist.
As I have detailed in previous articles, in recent months there have been dozens of fires at food production facilities in the United States.
But I suppose that is just another “coincidence”, eh?
And all of this is happening in the context of a rapidly growing global food crisis that threatens to cause historic famines all over the world for years to come.
Global leaders keep telling us that there will be food shortages in the months ahead.
I am taking those warnings quite seriously, and I believe that all of you should be taking those warnings quite seriously as well.
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About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written five other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, “Get Prepared Now”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending digital copies as gifts through Amazon to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
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Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
