Alarm Bells For The US Food Supply

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

How much more are you spending on food each month compared to two or three years ago?  In recent years, our leaders have been flooding the system with money at the same time that global supplies of food have been getting tighter and tighter.  On the other side of the world, hundreds of millions of people do not have enough food to eat on a regular basis and children are literally dropping dead from starvation.  Here in the United States, nobody is dropping dead from starvation, but demand at food banks is absolutely exploding as U.S. households struggle to deal with how oppressively expensive groceries have become.  Unfortunately, things are about to get even worse.

Right now, the largest fire in the entire history of Texas continues to rage out of control…

The biggest inferno in Texas history is being fueled by winds and high temperatures as it rages Sunday, threatening to incinerate more buildings, cattle and livelihoods across the Texas Panhandle while residents sift through ashes of what used to be homes.

Critical fire weather conditions were expected to continue Sunday in the area, with strengthening winds gusting to 50 mph and dry conditions combining to set the stage for rapid wildfire spread, the National Weather Service warned.

The Smokehouse Creek Fire has been burning for nearly a week and has torched more than 1 million acres in Texas alone, making it the largest fire on record in the state – and it is only 15% contained.

With each passing hour, even more cattle are being engulfed by the fires.

Nobody knows for sure how many have been killed so far.

Most news reports that I have seen say that it is “thousands”…

The largest wildfire in Texas history has devastated the state’s agriculture, blazing through more than 1 million acres of land in the Panhandle, killing thousands of livestock, destroying crops and gutting infrastructure.

The agriculture industry, a big driver of the state’s economy, was already facing pressures from prolonged and widespread drought that forced ranchers to manage smaller herds, contributing to a decrease in beef production nationally. The series of wildfires in the Panhandle this week is another blow as many ranchers tried to rebuild their herds and operations during the cooler months of the year.

What will the final death toll be?

According to Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, there are more than 10 million head of livestock in the region…

State Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told The New York Times that the Panhandle is home to roughly 85% of Texas’s cattle herds.

The region supports over 10 million head of livestock. Most of the cattle are kept in feedlots and dairy farms as farmers and ranchers attempt to shield their herds from the wildfires, Miller said.

“There are millions of cattle out there, with some towns comprising more cattle than people,” Miller told The Wall Street Journal.

Even before this disaster erupted, supplies of beef were really tight.

At this point, the size of the U.S. cattle herd is the smallest since 1951, and the size of the Canadian cattle herd is the smallest in 30 years…

Canada is the next nation to report a multi-decade low cattle herd.

At the beginning of the year, the USDA reported the lowest total U.S. head since 1951 at a little more than 87 million.

Now, Statistics Canada is reporting the Canadian cattle herd is at its lowest level in more than 30 years, totaling just 11 million cattle and calves on farms.

And even without the tragedy in Texas, we were already being warned that the U.S. cattle herd would get even smaller this year because we are looking at the “smallest beef calf crop since 1948”…

But that supply of feeder cattle will likely tighten during the rest of this year. The smallest beef calf crop since 1948, brought on by drought and high feed prices and the contraction of the beef cow herd, along with a significant decrease in replacement beef heifers, means that there won’t be as many cattle to put in feedlots to replace those going out.

Beef is now considered to be a “luxury meat”, and prices are only going to go higher throughout the remainder of 2024.

So if you enjoy beef, I would stock up now.

Of course it isn’t just beef that is going to become more expensive.

All over the western world, “green policies” are making things extremely challenging for farmers and ranchers.

During a recent appearance on Fox News, one industry insider warned that more U.S. farmers are going out of business “every day”…

While nationwide organizations like the FFA are going strong and statewide affairs like the annual Pennsylvania Farm Show and Iowa State Fair continue to draw exhibitors and guests alike, beneath the surface are troubling signs, two guests on “The Ingraham Angle” warned this week.

Globalist “green” policies as well as inflation and rising costs have led to thinner herds, and in some instances, foreclosure or shuttering of farms altogether, bringing with them a potential domestic food crisis, they said.

“Farmers are going out of business every day,” said John Boyd Jr., founder of the Black Farmers of America.

We have already seen farmers engage in wild protests all over Europe, and it is probably just a matter of time before we see similar protests here in the United States.

But even if government control freaks left our farmers alone, they would still have to deal with weather patterns that have gone completely nuts.

For example, this weekend an absolutely massive blizzard dumped up to 12 feet of snow on some parts of California, and wind gusts in some areas actually reached 190 miles per hour…

Hundreds of miles of California highways remained shut down Sunday as a powerful blizzard pounded parts of the Golden State and Mountain West with snow totals that could reach 12 feet amid howling winds with gusts that hit 190 mph − well above the 157 mph threshold for a Category 5 hurricane.

National Weather Service meteorologist William Churchill warned of “life-threatening concern” for residents near Lake Tahoe, calling the storm, now in its third day, an “extreme blizzard.” Areas of Nevada, Utah and Colorado were also affected.

“Moderate to heavy snow has persisted overnight across the northern Sierra Nevada,” the National Weather Service in Sacramento said in a social media post Sunday. “Wind gusts … are continuing to result in blizzard conditions.”

As I sit here, I am having a hard time even imagining what a blizzard with 190 mph winds would look like.

I cannot remember anything like this ever happening before.

But the truth is that weird storms like this will be the new normal.

Weather patterns all over the globe are breaking records, and that is making it really difficult for farmers and ranchers to do their jobs.

We have entered a time when a confluence of factors is creating a “perfect storm” for global food production, and global hunger has been steadily on the rise since 2015.

Sadly, the outlook for the years ahead is exceedingly bleak.  The amount of food that will be produced won’t even be close to what is needed to feed everyone on the planet, and so there will be a mad scramble for whatever is available.

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Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.