(The Epoch Times)—Most people check the weather the way they check traffic or the time. Rain might mean rearranging plans or canceling a child’s T-ball game. A cold snap might simply mean pulling out a sweater or your favorite tweed jacket. Weather, for most people, is an inconvenience or a conversation starter. Because when you need water, you turn on a faucet. When you’re cold or hot, you adjust the thermostat. Weather becomes background noise rather than a force that shapes survival.
For farmers, weather is everything.
We don’t just look at the forecast. We live by it. We watch humidity, wind patterns, soil temperature, and cloud formation with the kind of attention most people reserve for financial markets or national security briefings. A few degrees of difference can determine whether a crop thrives or dies. We wait for moisture the way some people wait for medical news. Because one wrong call can erase months of work.
Earlier this year, the temperatures had been in the high 90s for weeks. Summer seemed to arrive early, and the weather service confidently projected warm, stable nights in the 50s. Based on that forecast, we continued preparing the greenhouses and tending the spring crops. Everything looked promising.
Then one Monday morning in late April, we woke up to ice. Not frost. Ice.
Our greenhouses weren’t sealed, because the forecast told us we were safe. The propane heaters inside are set to turn on automatically at 38 degrees, and they ran full force all night. By sunrise, we had burned through $5,000 in propane, and everything was still dead. Every spring tomato. Every cucumber. Tender annuals. Guavas, lemons, and young tropicals. Outside the greenhouse, brand-new kale and broccoli seedlings that had finally established themselves were frozen limp and useless.
There was no warning. Just loss.
That is what it means when a farmer mentions the weather. He isn’t complaining. He is praying that a single cold snap, drought, hailstorm, or unpredictable shift doesn’t take away his livelihood. We do everything we can, but the weather still decides what survives.
Which is why the cultural conversation around climate and weather is so interesting. We’ve been quick for years to talk about climate change. And I’ve always said: If we’re going to talk about climate change, we also have to talk about geoengineering. Because at this stage, it’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins. It’s hard to know whether the shifts we’re experiencing are natural, human-caused, manipulated, or some combination of all three. It’s even fair to ask whether climate change exists in the exact framework we’ve been presented—or whether geoengineering exists in the exact framework we’ve been told—or whether the lines have been blurred without transparency.
This was once considered wild conspiracy, the kind of thing people joked about with tinfoil hat references. Yet now it’s discussed openly. Amazon Prime hosts documentaries about it. Universities conduct research on it. Weather modification companies operate publicly in multiple states. Government agencies acknowledge it.
Today here in Kerr County, after heavy flooding, a CEO of a weather modification company made a point to assure the public that his cloud seeding was not responsible for the rainfall. I’m not claiming it was. But when someone feels compelled to explain themselves for something everyone swore didn’t exist 10 years ago, the conversation has already changed.
And that leads to a reasonable and necessary question:
What is the ripple effect?
Weather is a system. Everything in nature is interconnected. If you add rain here, does that mean less rain somewhere else? If you alter cloud structure or reflect sunlight, does that shift wind patterns, soil moisture, or storm behavior? If we inject particles into the atmosphere to cool temperatures globally, what happens to regional rainfall, food systems, ecosystems, and planting zones?
Farmers think this way because we live in the reality of consequences. We don’t work in theory. We work in soil, water, frost, and risk. Every decision has an outcome.
So if geoengineering and cloud seeding are now part of public policy, private industry, and scientific pursuit, then the people whose lives depend most on natural systems deserve transparency. We deserve honesty. We deserve oversight. And we deserve a voice before—not after—changes are made.
We can choose what we eat and what we put on our bodies. But we cannot choose what falls from the sky.
Weather is not a casual headline or a political slogan. It’s the difference between feeding our community or losing everything. If climate change is real in the way we’ve been told, then geoengineering absolutely matters. If geoengineering is now a reality, then the climate narrative cannot be discussed without it.
The sky is not a laboratory. It is a life support system.
And the question that remains is not whether these experiments are helpful, harmful, necessary, or misguided.
The real question is much simpler.
Did the people beneath the sky ever consent?
Because I don’t remember being asked. And I doubt most people do.
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.