Tierra Monte, NM — In April of this year, the US government started the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history. The fires were set by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) — ironically to reduce wildfire risk — but having the opposite of their intended effect. Thanks to several acts of incompetence, neglect, and ignorance, the controlled burn morphed into a catastrophic blaze that engulfed over 530 square miles of mostly privately owned forests and meadows, while destroying 432 homes as well. Now, after burning down their homes and land, the state is demanding the victims pay for the damage themselves — despite previous reassurances that they would be given support.
“Today I’m announcing the federal government’s covering 100% of the cost,” President Joe Biden said after he visited the state in June. But, like so many words uttered from the mounts of US presidents, that was not true.
FEMA has so far granted $4.2 million to the 1,164 fire survivors, marking an average payout of $3,600. To one of the hundreds of folks who lost their home, this is a kick in the teeth.
According to a recent report in Reuters, cost-sharing statutes on federal relief programs are preventing the victims from receiving the help they need. Instead of the promised 100% of the cost, victims of the government’s seeming act of arson were told they are on the hook for 25% of the total cost, as per the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) guidelines.
Daniel Encinias and his wife Lori were victims of the government blaze and are now finding out that they are on the hook for the damage.
“Why the hell am I going to pay anything when I didn’t cause this damn fire?” Encinias told Reuters.
Naturally, as Reuters reports, these victims can’t simply shell out the millions of dollars it will take to repair the damages caused by the government’s fire.
Many fire-hit families cannot afford sharing at least 25% of costs on the USDA’s Emergency Forest Restoration Program (EFRP)which offers relief such as stabilization of burn areas prone to flash flooding, according to New Mexico State Forester Laura McCarthy. Residents sometimes own large areas of land passed down from 1800s Spanish-Mexican land grants while working blue-collar jobs.
“They’re really struggling,” said McCarthy.
Residents are now putting their hopes into a congressional bill that will fix the cost sharing nonsense but given the extremely slow turning wheels of Congress, this could be months or even years out.
Another victim, Leger Fernandez told Reuters that he is going straight to the USDA and is negotiating a waiver with the NRCS to drop the cost sharing provision.
“The federal government burns your house down so they are responsible in my mind to pay 100% of the cost of rebuilding,” Fernandez said.
“If you don’t have insurance you’re pretty much on your own,” said Kenny Zamora, 59, another victim, who like Encinias is considering joining a massive civil case that may be filed against the USFS.
For now, hundreds of families are living in tents and campers next to the ashes of their homes, hoping that something changes. But if history is any indicator, they will likely be waiting a very, very long time.
We’ve seen similar scenarios unfold within the police state when SWAT teams destroy the homes of innocent people and then tell them they are on the hook for the bill. In July of 2020, Vicki Baker, 75, was told she had to cover the $50,000 in damages to her home after police literally blew it up looking for a suspect. It would take her two years to finally get her money back.
The late Harry Edson Browne was a libertarian writer, public speaker and the Libertarian Party’s nominee for president in 1996 and 2000. Before he died in 2006, Browne made a statement that perfectly summed up this situation:
“The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, ‘See if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk.’”
Article cross-posted from The Free Thought Project.
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.
