Over the years I’ve read at least two dozen articles or watched videos telling us what to stock up on immediately. Most of them have been pretty decent lists. Some of them are sales pitches for whatever products the content creator is pushing. A handful were ludicrous.
(Article originally published at Late Prepper)
Hopefully, this one won’t be ludicrous and I’m not selling any of the items I’m recommending today. The need to stock up on important items ahead of… whatever… has never been greater in modern America. We’re a society of abundance, but it seems like the supply chain could crumble at any moment with massive threats on multiple fronts.
We’re starting with the basics. If you’re an experienced prepper you’ll probably laugh, but many of us have only even considered preparedness recently. In reality, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of items that we should stock up on as soon as possible, but I decided to do short lists like this one with only three items. It’s easier to take incremental steps and work our way up than to jump in and spend huge money all at once.
These obviously aren’t the only items. In fact, they’re probably not even the most important. But I figured I would put out bite-sized lists every couple of days so we can all prepare with baby steps. Just don’t take TOO small of steps. The trajectory of the nation is not a good one.
My criteria for these short lists are:
- Importance: If we included everything that we could use on lists like this, they would be infinite. But there really are only a few dozen items we truly NEED if the crap hits the fan.
- Risk of Future Price Hikes or Shortages: It behooves us to grab as many of a certain product as possible if that product’s price is going to rise sharply or if they wont’ be available in the future.
- Ease of Storage and Shelf Life: We could say eggs are extremely important and are likely going to be priced much higher in the future, but you can’t easily store 1000 eggs and they won’t last long enough for you to eat them.
- Potential for Barter: In the event of societal collapse (God forbid!), it may be necessary to have items that can be traded. Since I’m not a fan of trading food or ammunition, having other items available that your neighbors may want can benefit everyone if bartering becomes a thing.
- Eventuality of Use: I hate waste, so these are the items that will be used up over time even if the apocalypse doesn’t come.
- Not Food: Sustenance, shelter, meds, and ammunition are not on this list. Those are priorities and require more planning than just grabbing a bunch while at Costco. We’ll cover all of them at another time.
Let’s begin.
Fire Extinguishers
This probably isn’t the first thing one thinks about when it comes time to stock up on things. It’s not like we’re using these regularly… at least let’s hope you’re not using them regularly. But fire extinguishers will be extremely important in the event society collapses. If you can’t call the fire department then even a minor fire can grow and destroy everything.
Plus, it’s a good practice to have one in or near every room of your house.
One might say fire extinguishers should be disqualified from this list because of the “eventuality of use” criterium, but since they last 10-12 years their presence IS their use. In other words, not having to use them is a good thing but having them available if needed is important. They cost anywhere from $20 to $50 for small ones all the way up to hundreds of dollars for the larger ones. We have 5 spread around the house and 7 in storage, plus one in each vehicle.
Aluminum Foil
Foil is another item that may not be at the top of anyone’s list, but it’s one of the most versatile common supplies ever made by man. It can be used for so many things in a crap-hits-the-fan situation. In fact, I might have to write up a list of emergency uses.
As for regular use, there’s already an article by Good Housekeeping that highlights its versatility.
The reason it made it on this first essentials list is because if things go south, aluminum foil will be one of the first items to either skyrocket in price or become completely unavailable. And I’m not talking about full-blow societal collapse. If things go a little south, foil will become more premium.
Soaps
Various soaps are likely at or near the top of most stockpiling lists, and for good reason. They’re extremely necessary today and will be useful in a crap-hits-the-fan scenario. Moreover, they’re still relatively inexpensive, but that can change in a hurry.
Don’t go overboard. They are supposed to last for up to three years and realistically they can last a few years longer than that, but they deteriorate over time. Treat them like food items by keeping them in a rotation that you replenish after use.
Someday I will do a brief breakdown of the different types of soaps to keep on hand, but when getting started it’s a best practice to start with the soaps you’re using today and stockpile them until you have a sufficient supply.
More Items Coming
I recently read a list of 134 items to stockpile immediately before the end arrives. It was a pretty solid list, but after two weeks I realized I hadn’t bought any of the items. It was just so much to take in that even the “a ha” items that caught my attention didn’t make it into my shopping cart.
That’s why I decided to do these bite-sized lists. Maybe you can buy these items on your next shopping trip, then a new list will be ready before the trip after that.
Those who are flush with cash might prefer to just drop tens of thousands of dollars all at once and get it over with, buying plenty of supplies of dozens of items. Most of us can’t do that, thus the utility of these incremental lists.
Things are getting crazy but we needn’t worry. Getting prepared isn’t hard. It can even be fun. As it is said in 1 Timothy 5:8:
But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.
Stay frosty, folks.
Article cross-posted from Late Prepper.
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.
