Editor’s Commentary: A story from Oregon caught my attention because of its focus on diesel fuel and the energy crisis, but by the second paragraph I realized the bigger part of the story was the attack happening to our food supply. At a time when eggs, milk, butter, beef, and chicken products are becoming scarcer and more expensive, Democrats think it’s wise to place a moratorium on new and existing dairy and poultry farms.
Seriously.
For over a year we’ve been ringing the alarm bell about the inconceivable attacks on our food supply being done in the name of climate change. From the World Economic Forum’s goals of eliminating farms to Bill Gates’ intentions of forcing lab-grown meat on us, it’s clear American leftists and worldwide globalists are aligned against us to take complete control of the food supply.
This is the biggest reason we launched the only company in America that offers both frozen AND freeze-dried American beef in the same packages. The people want to eat steaks and other beef meals today, but it behooves us all to stock up on long-term storage beef as well. That’s why we launched Whole Cows (use promo code “nocrickets” for 15% off).
Here’s the article by Scottie Barnes from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times. The focus of the article is on the energy crisis which goes hand-in-hand with the food crisis. But pay special attention to what Democrats are trying to do to farmers and ranchers in our nation. This is The Great Reset unfolding before our eyes.
Critics Blast Oregon’s Efforts to Phase Out Petroleum Diesel and Restrict Farming
A series of climate bills now before the Oregon legislature could devastate rural communities and further fuel inflation, according to detractors.
The bills would phase out petroleum-based diesel fuel, levy sweeping new taxes on tires and off-road agriculture equipment, and place a moratorium on new and existing dairy and poultry farms, the majority of which are family owned and operated.
The farm moratorium “would magnify the strain on our food supply chain and further drive up costs for milk, chicken, eggs, beef, and pork,” wrote Republican state Rep. Cyrus Javadi, whose district on the northern Oregon coast has a timber, agriculture and dairy-based economy.
“Without diesel, we can’t provide the lumber and materials necessary to meet Governor Kotek’s homeless state of emergency declaration to build 30,000 new homes,” testified Angelita Sanchez before the Committee of Environment and Energy on March 9. Sanchez is co-director of Timber Unity, a natural resources PAC with 60,000 members.
If these policies are enacted, she fears they will create a break in the supply chain while raising the cost of goods and services to astronomical levels.
If It Moves, Tax It!
House Bill 3158, the “Clean Diesel Engine Tax” would levy a suite of new taxes on off-road machinery, such as that used in farming and logging.
Taxes would apply to sales and rentals of off-road machinery, tires, and the dyed diesel fuel used to power farm and other heavy equipment.
The bill also includes a “privilege tax” for engaging in the business of providing off-road diesel equipment and heavy duty vehicles.
The Oregon Farm Bureau (OFB) opposes HB3158 because it taxes “virtually every piece of equipment” that’s used in agriculture, as well as the fuel and tires needed to run it, at a time of rising inflation and other financial stressors.
It also burdens rural businesses with the cost of retrofitting trucks in the state’s largest metropolitan area, according to OFB.
Revenues from the tax would transfer to the “Clean Diesel Engine Fund.”
That fund provides grants to retrofit trucks to run on the new “green diesel” or biodiesel, which is required as part of Portland’s plan to phase out the sale of petroleum-based diesel.
Starting in 2024, petroleum diesel available for sale in Portland will be blended with renewable fuels at increasingly higher increments, until 99 percent of the petroleum content is phased out by 2030. The new blend will be called R99. Keeping one percent maintains federal tax credits for blenders and wholesalers.
Light and medium-duty trucks around Portland must be retrofitted to run the new green blend for owners to be able to renew their title and registration.
Until now, retrofit grants have been covered by $73 million from Volkswagen, which agreed to pay state governments $2.9 billion to resolve litigation over the auto company’s emissions violations.
However, the amount requested for upgrades now surpasses the money Oregon has remaining from that deal. That has lawmakers considering new sources of funding.
“Rural communities are not responsible for Portland’s air quality, but HB 3158 puts that responsibility squarely, and inappropriately, on the backs of our members,” the Farm Bureau said in submitted testimony.
Out With Petroleum-Based Diesel
Oregon’s SB 803 would essentially expand Portland’s petroleum-based diesel phase-out to the rest of the state.
Portland announced in December 2022 that it would become the first city in the nation to phase out the sale of petroleum-based diesel, calling it the first major step to reduce carbon emissions by 50 percent under the city’s “climate emergency plan.”
Opponents do not want to emulate Portland.
They claim the transition would raise the cost of fuel to the point it would be financially unsustainable for many farm and ranch families, hitting rural and low-income Oregonians the hardest.
“Petroleum-based Diesel runs 90 percent of commercial activity, including electric charging stations, lithium mining equipment, and the generators that provide emergency power backup to our hospitals,” testified Sanchez.
“Renewable diesel is not ready to replace that source.”
“To make the bio-diesel that Oregon needs each year would take nearly 13.8 million acres of farmland, but the state only has about 16 million acres of tillable soil,” testified Cody White, owner of White’s Hauling and Farm, which operates 40 semi-trucks.
Growing crops such as soybeans for biofuel could also displace food production acreage at a time when food security is a great concern, he explained.
Because Oregon does not produce soybeans, the state would be dependent on bio-diesel from other states.
With other states enacting similar restrictions on petroleum-based diesel, Oregon would be competing with California, New York, Washington, and Canada to purchase a limited supply of biofuels, Sanchez told The Epoch Times.
It would also be competing with China, which is the world’s largest soybean importer, accounting for nearly 60 percent of global trade and half of U.S. soybean export value.
“Meanwhile, 30 percent of all diesel rigs already meet emission standards and that number will grow as the market expands,” Sanchez said.
The Future of Farming
Meanwhile Senate Bill 85, the “Relating to Confined Animal Feeding Operations” bill would place a moratorium on new permits for farm operations” with more than 2,500 dairy cows and more than 125,000 chickens
The bill comes in response to a growing number of large operations proposed in the Willamette Valley near the Santiam River and concerns about pollutants and water use. It calls for an eight-year moratorium until the state studies the environmental, social, and public health impacts of such operations.
Nearly 700 environmental advocates, farmers and representatives from industry testified in person or in writing at a March 6 Senate Committee on Natural Resources hearing to express their opposition or support for the bill.
“This legislation would only accelerate the loss of family farms and local food production, killing jobs and businesses. As a result, Oregon would have to rely more on out-of-state livestock products,” Javadi wrote in his testimony.
Farmers with dozens to hundreds of animals shared their concerns about the future of livestock production in the state and its effect on the economy.
Nearly all raise chickens or cows for meat or milk products.
Large operators said they were forced to acquire more animals and land to pay for ever more taxes and fees and abide by regulations to compete in an industry controlled by multinational corporations.
Smaller operators talked about the impact to rural communities when a handful of large operators take over, driving up land prices and consuming limited water resources.
“We have slowly forced agricultural operations to get larger to survive. Yet now we’re here talking about limiting how big a farm can get or how many animals we think are appropriate,” testified Greg Addington, director of the OFB.
Eight lawmakers, including two Democrats in support of the bill and six Republicans opposed, spoke at the hearing.
State Sen. Suzanne Weber, a Republican, said halting new large operations and expansions for eight years would close many businesses in her district.
With at least 20 percent of the state’s industrial animal operations in his district, Republican State Sen. Lynn Findley, said the bill would be an economic disaster for his constituents.
Meanwhile, these bills continue to wend their way through Oregon’s legislature.
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.
