The dozen-or-so “atmospheric rivers,” also known as rain storms, that have hit California this winter so far have provided a much-needed reprieve from the persistent drought conditions that have plagued the state for many years. There is a downside, though: many of the state’s crop farms are now underwater from all this excess moisture, which is creating massive food and finance losses for the Golden State’s farmers.
Many people are unaware of this, but nearly half of all American agriculture is grown in California, generating more than $50 billion a year in revenue. The Midwest primarily grows genetically modified (GMO) corn and soybeans, along with wheat, while California grows most of the country’s fruits, vegetables, nuts, and leafy greens.
Because these atmospheric river storms have been hitting California one after another after another following many years of mostly dry conditions, a lot of that water is flowing from higher elevations to lower elevations rather than absorbing into oftentimes rock-hard soils. The result is many destroyed farms and farmers who have “lost everything.”
(Related: In the midst of covid, communist China saw similar heavy rains for a period of time that resulted in catastrophic destruction.)
The Sierra Nevada mountains are packed with record levels of snow that will eventually melt, delivering even more devastation to California farms
The worst-affected county right now is Tulare County, which is the second-largest county in the entire United States in terms of food production, generating more than $8 billion annually. One-fourth of that is dairy sales, while the rest is citrus and nuts.
Kern County, located just to the south of Tulare County, is the nation’s number-one producer of agriculture, with Fresno County, located just to the north of Tulare County, being third in terms of food production.
All three of these counties are being devastated by all this rain, as is Monterey County, located on the Central Coast of California, which is the nation’s fourth-largest food-producing county. Like the others, Monterey is experiencing devastating flooding, wiping out most of its vegetable and strawberry farms.
Brian Shilhavy, the editor of Health Impact News, put together a video with testimony from friends and family members he knows who live in these areas. Be sure to watch that video below to see for yourself their first-hand experiences with all that rain:
Even when the rains finally stop, it will not mean an end to the devastation. California’s vast Sierra Nevada mountain range is packed with record levels of snow that will eventually melt, delivering a double whammy to the farms below it.
“This is horrible and I feel so bad for these devastated people,” one commenter wrote about the horrific devastation occurring in California, as depicted in the above video. “As an animal lover, my heart broke when I saw the cats on the roof (but thank God they survived!) and the confused and panicked cattle being driven through the water by the chopper.”
Another wrote that Americans had better wake up fast and learn how to grow food the traditional way, starting in their own backyards (if possible) and around their local communities.
“As the technology crashes, more and more Americans are going to have to learn how to do actual work that produces something, rather than entertainment-based technology that produces NOTHING,” this person added.
“But the technologists haven’t figured this out yet, even as tens of thousands of jobs seem to disappear every week now. They are still throwing away money on AI and chat bots and other such useless products. But their banks are failing now, and their money will eventually run out.”
First it was not enough rain; now it is too much rain. You can keep up with the latest news about the “birth pangs,” as the Bible calls them, at Prophecy.news.
Sources for this article include:
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.
Commiefornica whines when centuries old cycles of droughts in their climate ruin their water-intensive crops. Then continue whining when erosion from ample rainfall destroys their crops. Erosion caused by overtilling and the absence of organic humus that used to bind the soil and provide natural fertility. Wouldn’t it be nice if they used the sustainable agricultural practices in areas with similar climatic conditions in the past?
Wouldn’t it be nice if industrial agriculture fully funded their crop insurance programs with some of the abundant profits they make on bumper crops during good years so that in years when they lose money, taxpayer-subsidized crop insurance doesn’t bail them out. Hmmm. Sounds like the banking industry, doesn’t it?
The story does not seem to be a mention that Tulare Lake is actually a lake. It was drained dry by irrigation projects that took the water to feed surrounding farms. In the intervening years, the lake bottom was developed into farms. Now “climate change” (aka sunspot cycle, or is it global warming?) has brought the rain and refilled the lake flooding the bottom land farms. . Those farmers should have bought flood insurance.