A friend whose family had farmed the land for many generations once turned to me in the middle of a sweet-corn field and said he couldn’t imagine living in a place where it wasn’t possible for him to get out of bed, walk outside buck naked, and start firing off rounds without consequence. I nodded in agreement and then reminded him that I’d be there before sunup the next day.
The laugh we shared was a nice respite under the baking sun, but his words have always stuck with me. I swear, I’ve learned as much in a cornfield as in a classroom. Maybe hard work and a connection to nature help purify the soul and elevate introspection, but farmers tend to be philosophers.
What my friend was describing, of course, is what we call freedom. And time after time in my journeys through life, I have stopped in my tracks to realize that I’d sacrificed the freedom of the cornfields for the artificial prisons society likes to construct. Those are surreal moments — when the mind of a farmer-philosopher kicks in and asks, “Why am I working so hard to lock myself up?”
If you don’t have a good answer to that question, then it’s time to take a step back and choose a new direction. “No price is too high to pay,” after all, “for the privilege of owning yourself.”
Freedom, to me, is not just some romantic notion that brings a fleeting, dreamy peace. It is everything. It is a profound gift from God to us to use to our fullest abilities during our time on Earth. We are free to lead moral lives or chase devilish pursuits. We are free to nurture our innate talents and discover our true callings or to forfeit those gifts until they vanish. We are free to liberate the oppressed or to become the oppressors. We are free to defend our freedom or to surrender to those who wish to take it from us.
We are free to recognize our personal agency or to relish the intoxicating allure of victimhood. We are free to decide whether this life belongs to us or to those who wish us to do their bidding. We are free, in other words, to accept the gift God has given us or to turn it down. That’s our choice. We are not ones and zeroes that can be filtered and manipulated according to the algorithmic designs of the World Economic Forum’s central planners. We are human beings with souls created by the only real central planner Who matters.
A lot of what is happening today is quite disconcerting for people. We’re in one of these periods of human history when things that have long existed are falling apart, and the things that will take their place have not yet been built. There is a general awareness that the world is not all right, and the older (and more experienced) are acutely aware that peace and freedom are under attack. In other words, they are intently aware that God is under attack because, after all, peace and freedom are His to give.
Now by saying that out loud, do the odds against us really seem so daunting? In a battle between New World Order communists and God, whose side do you think will prevail? Then it’s really no surprise that the neo-Marxists destroying the world today work so hard to belittle God, is it? For when people remember His presence, then globalism always looks so small.
In contrast, globalism looks all-powerful when the All-Powerful is ignored. Do you see how our enemies use an illusion to make us feel weak? Do you understand why a Great Reset intended to conquer the world must first rid the world of God? Do you grasp why those without spiritual conviction have become disciples of false prophets promising hollow salvation? “Trust us to control all economic relations,” they say, “and we’ll save you from catastrophic climate change killing the planet.”
“Trust us to feed, clothe, and shelter you,” they promise, “and all you have to give is your obedience.” “Trust us to keep you safe from disease,” they demand, “because compliance with our mandates and mass surveillance will one day set you free.” They promise life but give death. They promise happiness but spread misery. They promise freedom but deliver enslavement.
These are the people who have gotten together to “fundamentally transform” the world into their own image, and when you see them for the vulgar false gods and tyrants they truly are, then their hypnotic powers melt away. Never have so few “ruled over” so many on this planet as they do today.
Now, think about that for just a moment. In the fight for humanity’s future, on whose side would you rather belong? Uprisings in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Poland, Germany, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Panama are already telling the tale of what is to come. The elites have had their say, and now the people will have their answer.
Are we heading into stormy weather ahead? Yes. Should that scare us? Absolutely not. What we have approaching outside our windows is nothing new; it just feels strange because it is a conflict most of us have not seen for some time. The battle between freedom and control, good and evil is not only the story of humanity, but also the story of existence.
When it comes back around, as it always does, man is tested in ways in which preceding generations were not. There is a line drawn in the sand, so to speak. On one side are those human beings who crave so much power that they cannot imagine existing in a world where all are equal. On the other side are those who have long avoided power but who must now rise to the occasion.
One side is composed of “rulers” and the “ruled over”; the other side is blessed with the virtues of the courageous. One side builds systems of control; the other side seeks liberation. One side sells panic and fear; the other offers truth and self-determination.
It’s no small thing that lies before us, but no future worth winning ever is. Great achievements cannot be had without great struggles. Sometimes only freedom lost reminds us why freedom must be reclaimed. Sometimes it takes a tyrant to ignite a revolution. Sometimes it takes the wicked to steel the believer’s faith. Every few generations, the battlespace is shaped for great change. And every few generations, good people gather to hold the line.
So have courage, friends. It’s an interesting time to be alive. All will be well. Truly, we’ve got this. Imagine yourself walking through the tall, lusciously green stalks of a sea of corn, hidden from everything else in the world, save for a blue sky above and the Almighty Himself. Think of that peace, of that freedom. Take a deep breath. Now protect it.
Image by Anita S. from Pixabay.
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.
