Editor’s Note: At times such as this, it is good when experienced preppers like Daisy Luther offer valid reasons to be hopeful. It’s easy to assume the worst when it appears the worst is happening all around us, but as she notes in her article below, it behooves us to look at reality through a lens of positivity. This is why the beef company we just launched offers both freeze-dried beef for long term storage AND frozen beef. It’s not just about eating well for apocalypse. It’s about eating well today. Use promo code “daisy” at checkout for 15% off.
With that said, here’s Daisy’s inspiring article…
There’s a survival secret that not a lot of people talk about, and it’s how I know that more than likely, you’re going to survive whatever is coming at us next.
It’s easy to get swept away by the doom and gloom and the pending disaster of the moment. At times like this, it feels like we have annihilation bearing down on us from every angle: the economy is almost kaput, nuclear powers like Russia and China aren’t our biggest fans, and civil war could erupt at any moment. And that doesn’t even take into account random natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes, or horrific accidents like the train derailment in Ohio.
It’s enough to make you wonder how on earth you’re going to manage to live through what’s coming.
Suddenly there’s an avalanche of overwhelm, and it’s the kinds of questions that keep preppers up at night. Do you have enough supplies? Can you trust your group? Are you really ready? What if you forgot something vital? How can you get more money to get prepped? What if…what if…what if…
Let me stop you right there.
Spoiler: You’re probably going to survive it.
I have a lot of evidence supporting that. Here’s what you need to consider whenever you feel like you’re not going to make it.
Your ancestors survived.
First of all, you need to remember that you yourself come from a long line of survivors. It’s quite literally in your blood.
If your ancestors had not survived for dozens of generations, you wouldn’t be here. It’s not enough to simply have reproduced. Someone had to get the next generation to adulthood so that they, too, could procreate.
So while some probably died during horrible events in the past, plenty did not. Your ancestors have survived it all. They’ve survived big things like plagues, wars, the Great Depression, the threat of annihilation from various enemies, and natural disasters during times we couldn’t predict them and warn people using the news. They’ve survived smaller things, too, like floods, hurricanes, the S&L crisis, childhood diseases, the high price of gas, bad storms, hyperinflation, accidents, and governments running amok.
Enough of your ancestors got through such events that you are here: alive, well, and fretting about the future.
Look to the past, and you will see that you have everything within you to survive what’s coming for us, too. Survival is in your blood and in your bones. You, my friend, are the result of thousands of years of overcoming obstacles. You come from a line of people who avoided being killed by enemies, marriages, wars, pestilence, and love.
You are genetically wired for survival.
People regularly survive horrible events.
Another thing to consider is that people quite often survive terrible things. While some people do succumb to disaster, grief, or ill fortune, most people do not. Let’s look at some more recent history.
Sure, we can look back and say, “21 million people died from the Spanish flu.” But in 1900, eighteen years before that event, the population of the world was 1.6 billion people. So you could roughly extrapolate from that that one billion five hundred seventy-nine million people survived it. (1,579,000,000) Those are pretty decent odds, right?
And what about the Great Depression? This paper suggests that the only cause of mortality that increased was suicide, and this article says that the life expectancy of people actually increased during that time. In fact, it says that more people live longer during times of economic downturn, referencing the paper mentioned previously.
…historical research shows that during the 20th century, increases in U.S. mortality often occurred during times of economic prosperity, while decreases occurred during economic depressions or recessions.
In the first few years after the 1929 stock market crash, the only major cause of death that increased was suicide, says José A. Tapia Granados, a professor of politics at Drexel University and co-author of a 2009 research paper in PNAS about life and death during the Great Depression. While suicides went up, Tapia found that deaths from cardiovascular and renal diseases stabilized between 1930 and 1932, the worst years of the depression. Traffic deaths dropped in 1932. Deaths from tuberculosis, the flu and pneumonia also declined.
Around 100,000 people died during the Balkan War, and more than two million had to flee their homes to survive. The population of that area was about 4 million people, so again…while the death toll was horrific, more people survived than did not.
I’m not sharing any of this to belittle the horrendous things that have occurred throughout history. Any death that comes from a disaster or a war or a genocide or an economic catastrophe is a terrible thing. But the fact is that more people live through terrible events than succumb to them.
Some of it is out of your hands.
All of this is why we prep. We want to put ourselves firmly on the side of those who make it through to the other side. We want our families to suffer less from terrible events. But even people who’ve never heard of prepping, who’ve never stacked up a five-gallon bucket full of food, and who haven’t read any books or articles about the topic still have a decent chance of making it through.
Of course, some things are completely out of our hands. If you happen to be at Ground Zero when a nuke hits, there is no amount of preparation that can save you. The same thing goes for a terrible accident at the workplace or a collision with a drunk driver. If there’s an extinction-level event like a giant meteor, we’re all done. Sometimes your ticket gets punched, and it’s your time.
There are also some personal circumstances that can prevent survival, such as reliance on daily medication or equipment. Again, this is largely out of our hands, and there’s only so much we can do about it.
We prepare to give ourselves the very best odds possible, and we are right to do so. I feel much better knowing that I have skills and supplies put back that just might give me an edge during hard times. I will always be glad that I have taught my children vital prepper knowledge. Maybe we won’t just live through it but find a way to thrive in doing so.
Survival is how we’re wired.
But even without these things, humans are wired for survival. Even the silly ones. (Although sometimes you have to wonder about some of the folks you see these days – it seems like they can barely survive a day at work or school without “safe spaces,” much less an epic disaster.)
Our operational objectives as human beings are to survive and to further our species by protecting our young. We can adapt to the most astounding things in our efforts to do so. We’ve done it since humans first existed, and we’ll continue indefinitely.
Things may be very, very hard. The world could change dramatically and for the worst. We may wonder how on earth we’ll do it if we lose our house, our car, our way of life, and our stability. (I’ve been there.) And you know what? That will really suck if it happens.
But eventually, we’ll come out on the other side. And even while things are bad, we’ll love people, we’ll find reasons to laugh, we’ll enjoy whatever it is we’re eating, and we will do our best to keep in touch with the things that make us human. We need to focus on those simple joys instead of focusing on what we’ve lost.
We just have to keep going.
If we do, we’ll probably survive.
You’re going to make it.
So if you’re wondering whether or not your going to be able to survive this, you know what? You probably are. The statistics are all in your favor. You were born to be resilient.
You keep on doing the best that you can. Prepare to the best of your ability and learn new skills to make it a little bit easier. Be ready to adapt to changing circumstances. Control what you can and let go of what you can’t control. Remember to find happiness wherever you can.
And don’t forget who the heck you are.
About Daisy
Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, adventure-seeking, globe-trotting blogger. She is the founder and publisher of three websites. 1) The Organic Prepper, which is about current events, preparedness, self-reliance, and the pursuit of liberty; 2) The Frugalite, a website with thrifty tips and solutions to help people get a handle on their personal finances without feeling deprived; and 3) PreppersDailyNews.com, an aggregate site where you can find links to all the most important news for those who wish to be prepared. Her work is widely republished across alternative media and she has appeared in many interviews.
Daisy is the best-selling author of 5 traditionally published books, 12 self-published books, and runs a small digital publishing company with PDF guides, printables, and courses at SelfRelianceand Survival.com You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, Gab, MeWe, Parler, Instagram, and Twitter.
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.
