(End of the American Dream)—How much more are you spending on food each month compared to two or three years ago? In recent years, our leaders have been flooding the system with money at the same time that global supplies of food have been getting tighter and tighter.
On the other side of the world, hundreds of millions of people do not have enough food to eat on a regular basis and children are literally dropping dead from starvation. Here in the United States, nobody is dropping dead from starvation, but demand at food banks is absolutely exploding as U.S. households struggle to deal with how oppressively expensive groceries have become. Unfortunately, things are about to get even worse.
Right now, the largest fire in the entire history of Texas continues to rage out of control…
The biggest inferno in Texas history is being fueled by winds and high temperatures as it rages Sunday, threatening to incinerate more buildings, cattle and livelihoods across the Texas Panhandle while residents sift through ashes of what used to be homes.
Critical fire weather conditions were expected to continue Sunday in the area, with strengthening winds gusting to 50 mph and dry conditions combining to set the stage for rapid wildfire spread, the National Weather Service warned.
The Smokehouse Creek Fire has been burning for nearly a week and has torched more than 1 million acres in Texas alone, making it the largest fire on record in the state – and it is only 15% contained.
With each passing hour, even more cattle are being engulfed by the fires. Nobody knows for sure how many have been killed so far.
Most news reports that I have seen say that it is “thousands”…
The largest wildfire in Texas history has devastated the state’s agriculture, blazing through more than 1 million acres of land in the Panhandle, killing thousands of livestock, destroying crops and gutting infrastructure.
The agriculture industry, a big driver of the state’s economy, was already facing pressures from prolonged and widespread drought that forced ranchers to manage smaller herds, contributing to a decrease in beef production nationally. The series of wildfires in the Panhandle this week is another blow as many ranchers tried to rebuild their herds and operations during the cooler months of the year.
What will the final death toll be?
According to Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, there are more than 10 million head of livestock in the region…
State Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told The New York Times that the Panhandle is home to roughly 85% of Texas’s cattle herds.
The region supports over 10 million head of livestock. Most of the cattle are kept in feedlots and dairy farms as farmers and ranchers attempt to shield their herds from the wildfires, Miller said.
“There are millions of cattle out there, with some towns comprising more cattle than people,” Miller told The Wall Street Journal.
Even before this disaster erupted, supplies of beef were really tight. At this point, the size of the U.S. cattle herd is the smallest since 1951, and the size of the Canadian cattle herd is the smallest in 30 years…
Canada is the next nation to report a multi-decade low cattle herd.
At the beginning of the year, the USDA reported the lowest total U.S. head since 1951 at a little more than 87 million.
Now, Statistics Canada is reporting the Canadian cattle herd is at its lowest level in more than 30 years, totaling just 11 million cattle and calves on farms.
And even without the tragedy in Texas, we were already being warned that the U.S. cattle herd would get even smaller this year because we are looking at the “smallest beef calf crop since 1948”…
But that supply of feeder cattle will likely tighten during the rest of this year. The smallest beef calf crop since 1948, brought on by drought and high feed prices and the contraction of the beef cow herd, along with a significant decrease in replacement beef heifers, means that there won’t be as many cattle to put in feedlots to replace those going out.
Beef is now considered to be a “luxury meat”, and prices are only going to go higher throughout the remainder of 2024.
So if you enjoy beef, I would stock up now. Of course it isn’t just beef that is going to become more expensive.
All over the western world, “green policies” are making things extremely challenging for farmers and ranchers.
During a recent appearance on Fox News, one industry insider warned that more U.S. farmers are going out of business “every day”…
While nationwide organizations like the FFA are going strong and statewide affairs like the annual Pennsylvania Farm Show and Iowa State Fair continue to draw exhibitors and guests alike, beneath the surface are troubling signs, two guests on “The Ingraham Angle” warned this week.
Globalist “green” policies as well as inflation and rising costs have led to thinner herds, and in some instances, foreclosure or shuttering of farms altogether, bringing with them a potential domestic food crisis, they said.
“Farmers are going out of business every day,” said John Boyd Jr., founder of the Black Farmers of America.
We have already seen farmers engage in wild protests all over Europe, and it is probably just a matter of time before we see similar protests here in the United States.
But even if government control freaks left our farmers alone, they would still have to deal with weather patterns that have gone completely nuts.
For example, this weekend an absolutely massive blizzard dumped up to 12 feet of snow on some parts of California, and wind gusts in some areas actually reached 190 miles per hour…
Hundreds of miles of California highways remained shut down Sunday as a powerful blizzard pounded parts of the Golden State and Mountain West with snow totals that could reach 12 feet amid howling winds with gusts that hit 190 mph − well above the 157 mph threshold for a Category 5 hurricane.
National Weather Service meteorologist William Churchill warned of “life-threatening concern” for residents near Lake Tahoe, calling the storm, now in its third day, an “extreme blizzard.” Areas of Nevada, Utah and Colorado were also affected.
“Moderate to heavy snow has persisted overnight across the northern Sierra Nevada,” the National Weather Service in Sacramento said in a social media post Sunday. “Wind gusts … are continuing to result in blizzard conditions.”
As I sit here, I am having a hard time even imagining what a blizzard with 190 mph winds would look like.
I cannot remember anything like this ever happening before.
But the truth is that weird storms like this will be the new normal.
Weather patterns all over the globe are breaking records, and that is making it really difficult for farmers and ranchers to do their jobs.
We have entered a time when a confluence of factors is creating a “perfect storm” for global food production, and global hunger has been steadily on the rise since 2015.
Sadly, the outlook for the years ahead is exceedingly bleak. The amount of food that will be produced won’t even be close to what is needed to feed everyone on the planet, and so there will be a mad scramble for whatever is available.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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.
