(Alt-Market)—In early 2020 in the midst of the covid lockdowns, blue states run by leftist governors pursued mandates with extreme prejudice. In red states like Montana, after the first month or two most of us simply ignored the restrictions and went on with life as usual. It was clear that covid was not the threat federal authorities made it out to be. However, in states like Michigan the vice was squeezed tighter and tighter under the direction of shady leaders like Gretchen Whitmer.
Whitmer used covid as an opportunity to institute some bizarre limitations on the public, including a mandate barring larger stores from selling seeds and garden supplies to customers. “If you’re not buying food or medicine or other essential items, you should not be going to the store,” Whitmer said when announcing her order. The leftist governor was fine with purchases of lottery tickets and liquor, but not gardening tools and seeds.
She never gave a logical reason why she targeted garden supplies, but most people in the preparedness community understood very well what this was all about: This was a beta-test for wider restrictions on food independence. There was widespread rhetoric in the media throughout 2020 attacking anyone stockpiling necessities as “hoarders,” and now they were going after people planning ahead and trying to grow their own food. The establishment did NOT want people to store or produce a personal food supply.
Another prospect that was being openly discussed among globalists was the idea that lockdowns were “helpful” in ways beyond stopping the spread of covid (the lockdowns were actually useless in stopping the spread of covid). They suggested that the these measures could be effective in preventing global carbon emissions and saving the world from “climate change.” The idea of climate lockdowns began to spread.
The corporate media has since lied about the existence of the climate lockdown agenda, but articles and white papers extolling the virtues of shutting down the planet in the name of climate change are easy to find and read. The globalists and their academic defenders wanted PERMANENT lockdowns, or rolling lockdowns every couple of months, shutting down most human activity and travel outside of basic production.
I have argued in the past that what Whitmer was doing in Michigan was a part of this agenda – That her garden supply ban was part of a wider goal that had nothing to do with public health safety and everything to do with stopping people from prepping. The covid controls were only meant to be a precursor to carbon controls.
This past week we have seen more confirmation of this, as a study out of the University of Michigan claims that homegrown foods produce five times more carbon emissions than industrial farming methods. In other words, private gardens could be considered a threat to the environment. The Telegraph and other corporate platforms have jumped on the story, and I believe this is cause for concern.
The study includes analysis of various gardens from individual family plots to urban and community plots and claims that “garden infrastructure” for individual plots (such as raised beds) contribute far greater carbon pollution than large scale farming. The study seems to ignore the fact that raised beds are more efficient and grow more food in a smaller space, but I doubt they really care to take these kinds of things into consideration.
The average person might be confused by this and assume the opposite is true – Wouldn’t growing foods at home be BETTER for the environment? Not if your funding relies on portraying independent food supplies as bad for the planet. The study is bankrolled by a host of international groups, including the European Union’s Horizon Program which lists “100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030” as one of its project goals. These 100 cities are then supposed to act as flagship models for the eventual carbon agenda takeover of all cities by 2050.
Such groups have billions of dollars at their disposal and focus most of that monetary firepower on climate change research (propaganda). Do I think that the Michigan study is rigged in favor of a predetermined outcome? Probably. When these studies are funded by globalist interests, their outcomes always seem to favor globalist goals. The study itself does not necessarily argue that people should stop gardening, but it does push the narrative that carbon controls are necessary, even at an individual level.
The Michigan report might seem like a meaningless footnote. However, as we witnessed last year with a study from the Consumer Product Safety Commission on natural gad appliances, these little and obscure studies are often used to justify large scale government interventions into people’s daily lives. The CPSC study inspired months of debates from Democrats in the US demanding that gas appliances including stoves be banned because they MIGHT cause health side effects, specifically in children (it turns out the study had no concrete basis for this claim).
Leftists and globalists do not care about protecting your health; they care about how these studies can be used to fear monger, thus increasing their power. In other words, if you can rig the science, then you can rig the laws.
We saw something similar to this in a UN study in 2006 which claimed that meat production contributed to nearly 20% of all carbon emissions and was worse for the environment than transportation. The study was exposed in 2010 as “flawed” (fraudulent), but for years the media and globalist organizations used its false conclusions as a springboard to demand limitations and bans on meat production in the name of saving the climate.
If you think the war on farming which is raging right now in Europe is only intended to affect industrial farms, think again. The establishment is going to try to use the man-made climate change lie to dictate ALL food production, right down to your unassuming backyard garden. And they won’t limit their efforts to the EU; they will come after American farms with the same restrictions.
This is really what the globalist “net zero” programs and 15 minute cities are all about – They are based on the idea that all human activity needs to be monitored and managed. They say it’s for the good of the planet, but the systems they want to put in place from 2030 to 2050 sound like a new digital feudalism, a society where bureaucracies track and trace and micromanage every aspect of your life. The elites benefit greatly while never proving that carbon emissions are a danger to anyone.
Why the obsessive focus on food? Because if people have their own food, then they might be more willing to rebel against further mandates. It’s really that simple. The end game is obvious – Control the food, and you control the world. Do it in the name of saving the planet and a lot of people will even thank you as you starve them.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.