Why is it that the preparedness community is so marginalized by society? Why have we forsaken what is nothing more than common sense? In this article, I want to encourage my fellow preppers. Being prepared is not atypical. This is how humanity has always dealt with life.
This is our history.
For thousands of years, humanity has worked to plant and grow in the spring and summer and harvest in the fall to store food for the winter.
Were they “fringe” elements?
No: people used to dry, smoke, and salt meat to store over the winter months. Even before the age of canning and mason jars came about, the root cellars existed; cold storage, and also storage for dried grains such as wheat, oats, corn, and hay.
News flash: that’s “prepping,” or preparation.
Humans were given a beautiful gift: the gift of common sense.
It was that “common sense” that led the rulers of Britain and the United States to ask people to grow “victory gardens” for both WWI and WWII to prepare for times of shortages during those world wars.
We’re in an artificial “biome,” little more than a cage. And when the substance hits the fan, there will be no time to prepare. Your common sense will have been squandered.
Yesterday, self-sufficiency was the norm. It was common sense.
Now, it’s fostered dependency and you better believe it’s fostered! Study Cloward and Piven and their strategy for “top-down, bottom-up” economics.
At the time, LBJ was the crook-in-charge, and with his help, those two managed to initiate/create the welfare state and look at it today. Look at how the entire economy of the United States is coming apart, akin to a poorly-knitted sweater.
The gross inconsistency with the labeling is that the same people deride those who prepare. They squander their money on entertainment, alcohol, partying, and traveling around. Then they act as if those who prepared are evil. They have the audacity to say, “Well, they have something, so they have to give it to me because I don’t have anything!” They say it’s “hoarding” or “unfair.”
The rulers agree with you – the same vile, corrupt rulers who come after you for every dime while they party at Boca Raton or at Martha’s Vineyard – on taxpayer dollars. FDR wrote an executive order banning “hoarding,” and this was updated by virtually every President in office since then in some capacity. Just take a look at that article I wrote recently, entitled The Government Plans to Survive the Apocalypse…Without Us.
While they have us at each other’s throats arguing about who is allowed to go into what bathroom, they’re quietly stockpiling food, medical supplies, fuel, vehicles, and everything imaginable in underground bunkers all on taxpayer money. Are they preparing, or are they hoarding? Read that article I just mentioned, and see how products that are “removed from stores for safety concerns” mysteriously disappear. If they act as if prepping is common sense, shouldn’t you?
(Knowing how to preserve your own food is common sense as well. Check out our free QUICKSTART Guide to home canning to learn more.)
Now we’re coming to a critical juncture in present-day society.
The supply chains are drying up. Food production plants are “mysteriously” blowing up or catching fire and they’re being destroyed. Transportation is slowly being ground to a halt. California just made it impossible (and illegal) to operate in that state as an independent trucker. They practically forced the truckers to go into another state to ply their trade.
The supply chain hasn’t recovered from all the business-killing edits by the rulers and the stringent restrictions that have caused, at times, millions of tons of produce and supplies to go bad, sitting on the docks with no way to be transported.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Do you want to place your fate in the hands of those who are corrupt?
- Do you really think anyone occupying a political office will provide for you or your family when they’re without food?
- Have you done all that you can to make sure your family can eat when those times arrive?
- Will you be able to tell them that you did your best to provide for them and deliver more than just an apology?
Preparation should be as natural as anything else that you do around the house.
It doesn’t have to occupy every minute of your time, and it certainly isn’t something that you have to worry about to the point of panic. It doesn’t take much to truly and accurately assess what you have in your home and what you would do if all of the food deliveries, sales, etc. if they just stopped tomorrow.
It won’t “break” you to buy a case of food per week and some dry goods…in place of that beer or that night out on the town. I wrote one in May entitled Last-Minute Preps on a Shoestring Budget to provide some thoughts and suggestions on the matter. It’s a simple task with a point that’s clearly evident: as simple as Aesop’s Fable, “The Grasshopper and the Ant.” The little ant warned the grasshopper to set food aside for the winter, and the grasshopper paid him no heed. Then when the winter came, the grasshopper came straight to the ant’s door…for a handout.
That’s the way it will be.
You do what you want with your supplies and use discernment to determine how “good” a Samaritan you want to be. Just remember: the helpless beggar might have a whole squad of marauders with weapons right outside in the bushes, just waiting to find a soft heart, and a “soft” target. That’s also a part of common sense: take care of you and yours first, and then worry about taking care of others if it’s not to the cost of your own family.
Aesop wrote that fable a few thousand years ago, and it stands.
We’re already “long in the tooth” to be setting stuff aside. There’s still some time. Prepare as best you can, and pray without ceasing. Just as important as the supplies is the mindset that it takes to go with it: you provision for times of shortage before they occur. Do what you can now, and do the best that you can while there’s still some time left. Stay in that good fight, and fight it well!
What are your thoughts regarding preparedness? Is it a natural thing for you? Has it helped you in the past? Was there a time you found yourself unprepared for an emergency? Let’s talk about it in the comments.
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About Jeremiah Johnson
Jeremiah Johnson is the nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the U.S. Army Special Forces. Mr. Johnson is also a Gunsmith and a Master Herbalist. He graduated from the Special Forces course at SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, and escape) School, and is an expert in small unit tactics, survival, and disaster-preparedness. He lives in a cabin in the Rocky Mountains of Western Montana.
Article cross-posted from The Organic Prepper.
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.
