The horrific environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio has contaminated the air, the soil and the water in much of the region. So how much, if any, of the food that is grown in that part of the country will be safe to eat? I had not thought about that question too much until I received a very alarming phone call. One of the people that I spoke to during that phone call was a woman that I know personally.
I have known her for years, and I have visited with her in her own living room, and so I can vouch for her honesty. She told me that her “son-in-law manages three organic food farms in California, Idaho, and Washington State”, and that he is “warning family and friends to get ready for severe food shortages starting this spring”. Apparently there are several factors that will cause food supplies to be tighter, and one of the biggest is the fact that the “Ohio spill has contaminated a lot of land and water”. Apparently there is a scramble “to find clean food” and her son-in-law is receiving lots of phone calls from buyers in the eastern half of the nation that want to buy what his farms are producing.
We will just have to wait and see if things will be as bad as this source is suggesting.
But we do know that some companies have already started to take action due to concerns about contamination.
For example, one grocery chain has already removed bottled water from store shelves “because it was bottled 25 miles from the derailment”…
Weeks after a train derailment near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border left hazardous chemicals burning from railcars, fears of the potential impacts are being felt in places far from the accident.
Grocery chain Giant Eagle, with hundreds of stores in five states including Ohio and Pennsylvania, pulled bottled water off shelves out of an “abundance of caution” because it was bottled 25 miles from the derailment.
And we also know that large numbers of animals are dying.
In fact, officials are now publicly admitting that approximately 43,000 “fish, amphibians, crustaceans and other aquatic animals” are already dead…
The derailment in East Palestine potentially killed more than 43,000 fish, amphibians, crustaceans and other aquatic animals in nearby streams, state officials said Thursday.
It will take time for the stream ecosystem to recover, said Mary Mertz, director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
“We know it won’t be quick,” she said. “But it’s going to come back.”
Ultimately, the final death toll among animals will inevitably be much larger.
Another thing that we know is that lots of people that live in and around East Palestine are getting sick. The following example comes from the New York Post…
Wade Lovett’s been having trouble breathing since the Feb. 3 Norfolk South train derailment and toxic explosion here. In fact, his voice sounds as if he’s been inhaling helium.
“Doctors say I definitely have the chemicals in me but there’s no one in town who can run the toxicological tests to find out which ones they are,” Lovett, 40, an auto detailer, said in an extremely high-pitched voice. “My voice sounds like Mickey Mouse. My normal voice is low. It’s hard to breathe, especially at night. My chest hurts so much at night I feel like I’m drowning. I cough up phlegm a lot. I lost my job because the doctor won’t release me to go to work.”
We have never seen anything quite like this before, and there are so many questions that are going unanswered.
Right now, a lot of people are wondering why the EPA has suddenly stopped all shipments of contaminated waste from the disaster site…
Federal environmental authorities have ordered a temporary halt in the shipment of contaminated waste from the site of a fiery train derailment earlier this month in eastern Ohio near the Pennsylvania state line.
Region 5 administrator Debra Shore of the Environmental Protection Agency said Saturday the agency ordered Norfolk Southern to “pause” shipments from the site of the Feb. 3 derailment in East Palestine but vowed that removal of the material would resume “very soon.”
Why can’t they tell us why they made this decision?
And why won’t Joe Biden go to Ohio?
When he was directly asked about visiting East Palestine, this is how he responded…
The president answered, ‘At this point, I’m not,’ but then he appeared confused and strained as he tried to explain himself.
‘I did a whole video, I mean, um, what the hell, on,’ Biden rambled as he looked for reporters to fill in the gap.
‘Zoom?’ one of the reporters said, trying to help the president.
‘Zoom! All I can think of every time I think of Zoom is that song in my generation, Who’s Zoomin’ Who,’ he said, referencing the Aretha Franklin song.
Come on Joe.
Is that really the best that you can do?
Meanwhile, we continue to see very odd disasters happen at critical facilities all over North America. On Thursday, massive fires suddenly erupted at three different Pemex facilities…
Three separate fires at Petroleos Mexicanos facilities on Thursday killed one worker, left at least eight people injured and several others missing, putting the Mexican state oil company’s safety record under scrutiny ahead of its earnings call on Monday.
There were three separate fires in three different oil refineries owned by the same company, Pemex. All in one day.
What is going on???pic.twitter.com/4KJ55ARd49
— Sara Gonzales (@SaraGonzalesTX) February 24, 2023
Are we supposed to believe that three separate facilities all had catastrophic “accidents” on the exact same day?
Here in the United States, more than 100 food processing facilities have been mysteriously destroyed over the past couple of years.
How many incidents have to happen before authorities will finally admit that there is some sort of a pattern?
Food production just keeps getting hit over and over gain, and this comes at a time when the global food shortages that we have been anticipating have already begun.
I would highly recommend stocking up while you still can, because we are moving into times of great uncertainty.
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Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
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.
