He was a young, successful investor and family man who had it all. Although he owned property investments, was able to pay $350,000 in cash for a huge house, and lived an affluent lifestyle, Joe Wilder, a religious man, saw the “shenanigans” in his workplace and became disenchanted with the whole deal.
He conceded he had gotten “sucked in” by ego. Now he wanted out. He wanted his family out. It would be a hard, Biblical restart for all their lives, but the northeastern United States family pulled up, moved to Texas despite knowing no one, and found freedom on a small, unfinished plot.
Nearly ten years on, Joe and his wife, Faith, have six kids and a farm that feeds them wholesome, unprocessed food where their kids don’t get spoiled, because they have to work, and are homeschooled as biblical Christians. It’s the lifestyle Joe had wanted for them—one he believes aligns more closely with God’s word.
Their paradigm shift is one society at large might learn from, as the family of eight—having become content creators—share their agrarian exploits on YouTube, teaching the truth about how things are, and how they might be. You needn’t live in the rat race like you were taught!
Some have called him “crazy” for his adventurism. But for Joe and his family, it makes perfect sense.
“We moved with just a little bit of cash savings, and a small, one-way U-Haul trailer that was 8 by 12,” Joe, 47, told The Epoch Times. “We left our newly remodeled home with new appliances and everything; we just foreclosed on that.
“We had $70,000. If we had $125,000 or $150,000 back then, we could have bought our pick of whatever.
“We looked at a lot of fixer-upper properties, and it took us about six months to find the place we’re at now.”
Growing up poor himself, Joe spoke with his wife about how they would raise their kids. “How do our kids grow up hard? How do they struggle if we have all this abundance?” he asked her. “How do you artificially recreate that?”
Homestead life provided the answer with its rugged lifestyle that teaches responsibility, where “they put their efforts and sweat into that and reap the rewards,” Joe said. They would feed themselves “healthy, holistically-grown, organic food, and know where it comes from;” instead of “expecting these multinational mega-corporations to feed us. … They have clearly indicated that they want to poison us.”
Yet the family knew absolutely nothing about farming. They would learn. God would honor their faith by “filling in the gaps,” Joe said. “God rewards those that truly believe what He says.”
He told his wife what they were not going to do. “We’re not going to retreat into the egalitarian, complementarian thing—you know, dual income, no kids,” he said. “God will honor it.”
So, retreat they did not. Take up farming they did—even in the face of what society whispered: “You don’t know how to grow food; how do you do this?”
“We decided, as a family we’re going to all do this together,” Joe said. “God will fill in the gaps.”
Eight years into their gardening foray, the Wilders have achieved agricultural success. Trying various growing methods—the Hügelkultur method, raised beds, and more recently the Mittleider method which makes use of a highly-efficient direct-irrigation drip system, ideal for the dry Texas climate—their food production efforts have borne fruit. Literally. And vegetables.
There are four main food bars on the farm. They grow stalks and propagate fruit trees in a 20- by 40-foot (6- by 12-meter) greenhouse; those trees have now become a 400-strong fruit forest. The boys built a 20 by 40 carpentry workshop and have a YouTube studio where they process orders for the meat produce they raise and sell to customers nationwide.
Yes, they have livestock. Besides their 30 hens, 20 Muskogee ducks, and 2 Cooney pigs, they have 5 horses and, more impressively, 15 Texas longhorn bulls. All are raised rotationally, holistically, and organically, without vaccinations. They have two ponds stocked with catfish.
All their agrarian efforts helped them plug into Texas culture and history. “The only reason Texas exists as a state post-Civil War was because of the Texas longhorn,” Joe said of the 1,500-pound (680-kilogram) animal they obtained from a neighbor. “Texas longhorns saved the state of Texas, and we want to preserve that history.” The freedom-loving Lone Star State dad added, “I feel terrible having to reference the great Republic of Texas as a ‘state.’”
Matt, the eldest son, has fully embraced cowboy culture. That includes driving into town all “cowboyed up” in his pickup. “You got your short sleeve button-up shirt, your jeans, and your cowboy hat and your cowboy boots,” Matt, 18, told the newspaper. “It’s absolutely practical for down here.” Were he wearing sweats, sneakers, and a ball cap, he would “feel weird.”
More importantly, they are cultivating Southern manners. “I have so much respect for the older generation,” Matt said. “I walk up to them and say, ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and open doors for them.” In turn, they impart the secrets of Southern success.
The boys are predominantly homeschooled. Typically that entails a two- or three-hour school day following a curriculum. Faith allows them free reign to follow their interests—be it figuring out Photoshop, carpentry, or electrician work.
Yet Joe understands that critics will point out all the things they’re supposedly missing out on being isolated from mainstream academics. Again, “God will fill in the gaps.”
“What we are isolating them from are postmodernism, critical race theory, and that whole wokeism,” Joe said. “We’re going to continue to be faithful to what we fundamentally understand is true.”
Matt, who communicates astutely, respectfully, and with confidence, added, “I get so much socialization it’s incredible, especially when you live in a small town. Everybody is your best friend.”
Far from shutting out the world to live in blissful ignorance, the family evangelize their down-to-earth, often cutting, insights about life on social media: The old paradigm of “banker-driven perpetual, endless wars” has seen society corralled into big cities, where the masses are easily controlled; here’s how you can live free.
“The Bible warns us about this kind of stuff,” Joe said. “Every government portrayed in Scripture is a beast, and the beast has to be chained.” The Founding Fathers understood as much.
The Wilders now are breaking the cycle. They are real American pioneers. “It’s walking in light and walking into the truth,” Joe said. “We do it just to inspire people. … There’s a better life for you than that rat race you’re taught in school.”
The family produce TheTexasBoys YouTube channel, where Joe goes by “T.D.” (Texas Dad). “Joe Wilder” is a pseudonym, as he asked that his and his family’s identity be concealed for security reasons.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
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.
