I honestly did not know that things were this bad. Severe drought is crippling winter wheat production in the middle of the country, agricultural production in many areas of California is being hit extremely hard by unprecedented flooding, and orange production in Florida is down more than 60 percent from last season due to a combination of factors. Of course this comes at a time when the entire world is dealing with a major food crisis. As I discussed in a previous article, even CNN is admitting that we are currently in the midst of “the worst food crisis in modern history”. So this is a year when we need U.S. food production to be very strong, and that simply is not happening.
No state produces more winter wheat than Kansas does, and right now less than 20 percent of the winter wheat in the state “is in good to excellent condition”…
Less than 20 percent of Kansas winter wheat is in good to excellent condition. The U.S. Drought Monitor says only 15 percent of Kansas’ acres are not experiencing any level of drought stress. More than 36 percent of the state reported D4 exceptional drought compared to just a little over one percent last year. D3 extreme drought conditions are hurting 16 percent of the state, with D2 severe drought hitting 13 percent of Kansas.
Unfortunately, the winter wheat in other crucial states is also greatly suffering due to seemingly endless drought conditions…
Colorado winter wheat was rated 27% good to excellent and 33% very poor to poor. Oklahoma’s and Texas’ crops were rated at 26% and 18% good to excellent, and 40% and 47% very poor to poor, respectively, he said.
This is really bad news.
Wheat prices just continue to escalate, and that is especially true for hard-red winter wheat…
The spread between hard-red winter wheat and soft-red winter wheat has blown out to a record high as drought threatens crop yields across the Midwest and other major farming regions.
Hard-red winter wheat’s premium over soft-red winter wheat is $1.72 a bushel in Chicago on Tuesday morning, surpassing the 2011 record.
Meanwhile, the outlook for spring wheat is not particularly promising, because U.S. farmers have planted the smallest amount of spring wheat since 1972.
Out on the west coast, too much water is the problem.
In fact, 78 trillion gallons of water has fallen on the state of California in recent months…
More than a dozen powerful storms later, 78 trillion gallons of water has been dumped on California, reversing a multi-year drought in a matter of months. Now the agricultural powerhouse state, producing about a third of the country’s vegetables and three-quarters of its fruits and nuts, faces planting delays due to washed-out fields.
When it comes to fruit and vegetable production, no other state even comes close to California, and so we should be greatly alarmed that farms all over the state look like swamps at this moment.
This small farm area in #California just a bit flooded. #CaliforniaFlooding pic.twitter.com/l03kmasTuz
— Sports Plus (@PrepSportsPlus) March 21, 2023
And this is just the beginning.
The mountains in California are absolutely teeming with unprecedented amounts of snow right now, and when it all starts melting all of that water is going to have to go somewhere…
California’s snowpack levels varied by region, with the Southern Sierra snowpack reaching 300% of its April 1 average and the Central Sierra reaching 237% of its April 1 average, officials said. And the critical Northern Sierra, home to the state’s largest surface water reservoirs, is at 192% of its April 1 average.
On the east coast, the big news is what has happened to Florida orange production.
At this point, it is down a whopping 60.7 percent from last year…
Orange production in Florida is down 60.7 percent from last season, one of the lowest figures since the 1930s, according to US Department of Agriculture estimates.
This drop in production has been caused by citrus greening disease and a very tough hurricane season.
Sadly, there are some farmers that have lost almost all of their oranges…
Vernon Hollingsworth grew up in Florida among his family’s orange trees, recently ravaged by a double whammy of disease and a hurricane that have sent juice prices spiraling and left farmers blinking in disbelief.
On a recent March morning, the fifth-generation farmer drove a pickup truck through the rows in his grove, pointing out the damage from Hurricane Ian last fall such as uprooted trees.
“I lost 95 to 97 percent of my crop,” the 62-year-old told AFP, adding “we’re going to have to rebuild, and we need help to do that.”
On top of everything else, the number of beef cows in the United States has dropped to the lowest level since 1962 because ranchers in the middle of the nation have had to cull their herds due to the historic drought.
U.S. food production has been hit by disasters in the past, but we have never had so many strike in such a short period of time.
And the weather just keeps getting crazier and crazier. In fact, as I write this approximately 70 million Americans are being warned that yet another “multi-state tornado outbreak” is on the way…
Nearly 70 million Americans are bracing for yet another round of powerful storms as a severe system makes its way across the US Tuesday, threatening states from Texas to Michigan.
Set to strike this afternoon, the severe weather will bring damaging winds and potentially tornadoes to states in the already storm-stricken South and Midwest, days after a deadly multi-state tornado outbreak crippled the regions.
Of course all of this is happening in a broader context.
Global food supplies just keep getting tighter and tighter, and the head of the UN World Food Program is warning that “we literally could have hell on earth if we’re not very careful”…
Beasley said WFP was just forced to cut rations by 50% to 4 million people in Afghanistan, and “these are people who are knocking on famine’s door now.”
“We don’t have enough money just to reach the most vulnerable people now,” he said. “So we are in a crisis over the cliff stage right now, where we literally could have hell on earth if we’re not very careful.”
Hopefully food supplies will be funneled to those that desperately need it in the months ahead.
But global hunger has been rising at a very rapid rate in recent years, and it is going to continue to rise.
As I detail in several chapters in my latest book, worldwide famine is inevitable no matter what decisions global leaders make now.
All over the world, topsoil is being depleted at a frightening rate, supplies of raw materials that we use for making fertilizer are becoming extremely tight, and farmland all over the planet is being systematically poisoned by microplastics.
The era of abundant food is ending, and our leaders know this.
But most people in the general population are totally clueless about all of this, and so they have no idea what is coming.
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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.
This sounds like an ad for climate change. No mention of the destruction of the dozens of food processing and distribution plants, or the BS Bird Flu epidemic (resulting in the put-down of millions of chickens and turkeys), or the poisoning of chicken feed last month, or Bill Gates and the Chinese buying up U.S. farmland and letting it go to seed, the crippled supply chain, or the depletion of the strategic oil reserves?
Agreed. This sounds like an attempt to paint a man-made (as in China and Gates buying productive farmland to let it go fallow) effort to disrupt the food supply (as in supporting a useless war in a corrupt country vital to global food supplies and restricting the distribution of fertilizers–as well as everything you mentioned) as a natural disaster (or series of disasters). This situation is planned, and the planners are so proud of their efforts they crow about it. And no one pays attention. Or they try to make it a natural disaster.
WOW! I couldn’t have said it better! I wish all Citizens of this once great Country had your insight! The FACTS speak for themselves and any amount of research will prove you correct.
Gates has a god syndrome.
Who said “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”?
People of America, repent and ask forgiveness from him above, and this nation will be better than ever before.
Buzzards coming home to roost. After WWII, the war industry had to find a different market for their explosives, poison gases and heavy metal war machines. Presto chango, we go from centuries of agriculture based on natural resources like sun, rain, and photosynthetis producing organic humus, natural pest control and soil fertility from the trillions of microorganisms in a teaspoon of the living soil and soil aggregates from the humus compounds, polysaccharides and glycoproteins. This provided increased porosity promoting aeration, water rentention and enhanced soil sites for retention of the entire spectrum of readily available nutrients in the root zone. Now industrial agriculture has replaced soil microorganisms that are the basis for soil fertility and natural immunity to plant diseases and pests and organic humus with expensive inputs like artificial fertilizers, pesticides and destruction of soil tilth and water rentention with constant tillage. Living soil has been turned into sterilized dirt where pathogens thrive, and dirt lacking organic material erodes. Toxic chemicals leach into the groundwater and runoff to the streams, lakes and oceans.
Instead of past sustainable practices successfully producing diverse nutrient-dense food in semi-arid areas similar to California, we have an unsustainable system that rewards industrial agriculturists and the Monsatans and John Deeres in bountiful years and pays taxpayer-subsidized crop insurance in the bad years. California’s climate has always had periods of drought followed by years of adequate snow in the mountains to provide for food production. Now big ag whines when they get droughts and whines some more when they get lots of rain. Either way the consumer and the Earth loses and Big Ag wins. Sounds like the bank crises, doesn’t it? You and the Earth lose, they win…always.
Excellent comment…thanks.
AS THE WORLD TURNS. nothing stays the same on a planet.