Significantly higher food prices are coming, because U.S. food production is going to be way below normal levels this year. That is really bad news, because food prices are already absurdly high. In some cases, people are paying as much for a full shopping cart full of food as they did for a used vehicle in the old days. I wish that I was exaggerating, but I am not. Unfortunately, food prices are only going to go higher because farmers and ranchers are being hit extremely hard from coast to coast. For example, it is being reported that wheat farmers in Kansas “will reap their smallest harvest in more than 60 years”…
Kansas has been called the country’s breadbasket. Now, wheat farmers in the state will reap their smallest harvest in more than 60 years.
This will go directly down the chain, from farmers to consumers at the grocery store.
Kansas normally produces more wheat than any other U.S. state by a wide margin.
But now the harvest in that state will be the smallest that we have seen since 1957…
For the last two years, a drought has withered a lot of the crop.
Now, this year’s wheat harvest in Kansas is shaping up to be the smallest since 1957. That year, the Eisenhower administration intentionally suppressed wheat production.
There were 166 million people living in the United States in 1957.
Today, there are 331 million people.
So who is going to volunteer to give up eating wheat this year so that others can consume what they normally do?
At this point, things are so bad that we are being told that flour mills in Kansas “will likely have to buy wheat grown in eastern Europe”…
Kansas flour mills will likely have to buy wheat grown in eastern Europe.
For decades, Kansas has led the nation in wheat production. The U.S. leads the world in in wheat exports, as well.
This is a major problem.
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But can’t we all just eat more corn instead?
After all, corn is already in thousands upon thousands of different products that Americans consume on a regular basis.
Well, it turns out that corn production is being greatly affected by drought as well. The following comes from a Newsweek article entitled “Corn Prices Set to Soar After Midwest Hit by Worst Drought in 30 Years”…
An unusually dry May in the Midwest has raised concerns over this year’s corn crop in the Corn Belt, the region stretching from the panhandle of Texas up to North Dakota and east to Ohio which dominates the country’s corn production.
For a long time I have been warning that Dust Bowl conditions would return to the middle of the country, and now we are here.
Extremely dry conditions are being accompanied by unusually hot temperatures, and this combination is causing all sorts of havoc for corn farmers…
The USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service recently reported increasingly dry topsoil, poor pasture conditions in Missouri, and limited moisture for newly planted crops.
“We have very high temperatures all the way up through the northern plains of the Midwest, which impacts more than just corn and soybeans—it’s impacting other crops as well,” Curt Covington, senior director of partner relations at AgAmerica, America’s largest nonbank agricultural lender, told Newsweek.
We desperately need rain, and lots of it.
More than a third of all U.S. corn production is in areas that are currently experiencing drought, and the situation is especially dire in the “Corn Belt” states…
According to the US Drought Monitor, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin, often called the “Corn Belt” states, are experiencing “exceptional drought” to “moderate drought.” The timing of the drought, this early in the season, could stress young plants.
Normally, if there is going to be serious drought in the middle of the country we see it later in the year.
So the fact that there is this much drought this early in 2023 is a really bad sign.
Of course it isn’t just wheat and corn farmers that are suffering…
- The size of the U.S. beef cow herd is “the smallest since 1962”.
- The orange harvest in Florida will be approximately 56 percent smaller than last year.
- Thanks to extremely bizarre weather, approximately 90 percent of Georgia’s peach crop for 2023 has been destroyed.
Most Americans don’t realize that things have gotten so bad.
If you do not know how to grow a garden, you might want to learn.
Food prices are already painfully high, and they are only going to go higher.
And this is all happening in the context of the worst global food crisis in modern history.
Hunger has been spreading around the world like wildfire, and Yahoo News is reporting that last year there was “a 33% spike in the number of people facing hunger globally”…
The 2023 Global Report on Food Crises, which published its findings last month, found that last year saw a 33% spike in the number of people facing hunger globally from the previous year, up from 193 million people in 53 countries and territories in 2021. It was also the fourth consecutive year that an increasing number of people experienced Phase 3, or above, food insecurity, which designates their situation as serious, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a tool for improving food security analysis and decision making.
Sadly, this is just the beginning. Due to multiple long-term trends which I discuss in my latest book, global famine has become inevitable.
No matter what decisions our leaders make now, they aren’t going to be able to keep global food production from collapsing in the years ahead.
They know this, but they don’t want everyone to freak out. I would greatly encourage everyone to start becoming less dependent on the system and more self-sufficient.
Global food supplies are going to keep getting tighter and tighter, and once we get to a real crisis point you will want to be able to take care of yourself, your family and those that will be depending on you.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
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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.