(Natural News)—Bayer has been ordered by a jury to pay $857 million to a group of former students and parent volunteers at a school in the Seattle area who suffered from ailments such as brain damage as a result of their exposure to toxic PCBs, a court has ordered.
Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, were found to exceed safe levels at the Sky Valley Education Center. Five students and two parents who volunteered there participated in the suit after suffering from health problems linked to these chemicals in the school’s fluorescent light fixtures.
After a two-month trial in the King County Superior Court, the jury reached the verdict, which includes $784 million in punitive damages and $73 million in compensatory damages.
It is the eighth time that a jury in Washington has found Bayer must be held liable for children becoming ill due to exposure at the school, with a total of more than $1.5 billion being awarded so far in damages in such cases.
In 2021, a group of three teachers were awarded a sum of $185 million, while a $275 million verdict was handed down last year to a group of 10 students and parents. Another jury determined Monsanto owed a group of employees of the school $165 million last month. There are an additional 19 cases awaiting trial in King County Superior Court.
When the school was constructed in 1950, around 95 percent of its light ballasts contained PCBs. Students and teachers observed a brown and oily liquid coming from the light fixtures for many years, and staff reportedly instructed children to stay away and placed trash cans there to collect the liquid.
One of the plaintiffs said she believed the school was “poisoning” her and her children. One of her daughters reportedly passed out while at school, while another had to start using a mask because she had become so sensitive to chemicals and scents after starting school there.
All of the seven plaintiffs in this case have experienced nervous system dysfunction in connection with time spent teaching or learning at the school. Some also experienced endocrine system problems and other health concerns. They all spent time there between 7 and 18 years ago.
Not surprisingly, Bayer is appealing the decision. The German pharmaceutical giant purchased Monsanto, who manufactured the chemicals, for $63 billion in 2018 and has been dealing with a slew of lawsuits related to the company’s toxic herbicides.
Monsanto knew PCBs were toxic and covered up the risks
Monsanto knew that the chemical was toxic and covered up the risks of exposure, which include cancer and other illnesses, for many years. Internal communications show that Monsanto was aware that their PCBs, also known as “aroclors,” were toxic as far back as 1955, but they did not stop producing them until 1977, when they were faced with strong regulatory pressure.
The chemicals were widely used at the time for insulating electrical equipment. They were also found in paint, floor finishing products, caulking and carbon copy paper. Known as “forever chemicals,” they break down very slowly in the environment and can seep from caulk and paint into the air. They were banned by the federal government in 1979 on account of their links to cancer.
Monsanto and Bayer are also facing legal scrutiny over PCBs found in Vermont schools. The state’s legislature has ordered a search for PCBs in all schools in the state that were constructed before the toxic chemicals were banned. Several schools have already closed down parts of their property in response to the findings.
Burlington High School shut down in 2020 after high levels of PCBs were found there, and students have been learning in makeshift classrooms at a former Macy’s department store situated nearby for the last three years.
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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.