5 Specific Reasons Why You Should Stockpile Food Right Now

For decades, Americans have not needed to be concerned about food prices.  Yes, prices would always go up by a little bit each year, but in general we have been extremely blessed for a very long time.  Our supermarkets have always been packed with food, and we could always count on the fact that prices would be about the same a month or two down the road.  Unfortunately, things are now changing, and not in a good way.  A massive wave of inflation has hit agricultural commodities, and food producers have felt forced to pass those cost increases along to consumers.  Unfortunately, many experts are anticipating that the price hikes that we are currently witnessing are just the beginning.

So even though food prices have already become quite painful, they are never going to be any lower than they are at this moment.

Looking forward, there are several factors that are likely to combine to cause food inflation to accelerate even more in the months ahead.  The following are 5 specific reasons why you should stockpile food right now…

#1 Supermarkets are feverishly stockpiling food, and the Wall Street Journal is reporting that they are doing this in anticipation of “the highest price increases in recent memory”…

Supermarkets are stocking up on everything from sugar to frozen meat before they get more pricey, girding for what some executives anticipate will be some of the highest price increases in recent memory.

This only makes good business sense.  If you can get inventory now for significantly less than you will be able to get it for later, that will help your bottom line.

The Wall Street Journal is admitting that all of this stockpiling “is driving shortages of some staples”, but it is expected that these shortages will just be temporary.

I can’t remember a time when we have seen anything quite like this.  At this point, some companies are purchasing up to 25 percent more food than normal

David Smith, CEO of the US’s largest wholesaler Associated Wholesale Grocers, told the Wall Street Journal they have been buying 15 to 20 percent more goods – particularly packaged foods with long shelf lives.

‘We’re buying a lot of everything. Our inventories are up significantly over the same period last year,’ said Smith.

At SpartanNash in Michigan, the retailer has bought up around 20 to 25 percent more than normal including frozen meat.

#2 The U.S. government is going to continue recklessly spending money, and the Federal Reserve is going to keep pumping more giant mountains of fresh cash into the financial system.

The Biden administration doesn’t seem to have an “off button”, and neither does the Fed.  The U.S. national debt is moving up toward the 29 trillion dollar mark very rapidly, and the Fed’s balance sheet has more than doubled over the past year.

Unless there is some sort of a dramatic reversal, and I don’t see why there would be, this continual flow of new money will continue to push food prices even higher.

#3 Gas prices keep surging, and this is making it more expensive to transport food around the country.

According to the AAA Gas Price Index, the average price of a gallon of gasoline is up 56 percent from what it was last May…

Transport costs are also rising with gas prices rising 56 percent in May from a year ago.

On Friday, the AAA Gas Price Index pegged the national average gas price at $3.086, up from $2.171 one year ago.

#4 The endless “megadrought” in the western states just continues to intensify.

If you look at the latest U.S. Drought Monitor map, it is a horror show.  We haven’t seen anything like this since the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s, and water levels are dropping dangerously low.

For example, the water level in Great Salt Lake is expected to hit the lowest level in 170 years this summer…

The lake’s levels are expected to hit a 170-year low this year. It comes as the drought has the U.S. West bracing for a brutal wildfire season and coping with already low reservoirs. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, has begged people to cut back on lawn watering and “pray for rain.”

For the Great Salt Lake, though, it is only the latest challenge. People for years have been diverting water from rivers that flow into the lake to water crops and supply homes. Because the lake is shallow — about 35 feet (11 meters) at its deepest point — less water quickly translates to receding shorelines.

Because there is not enough water, many farmers are having to dramatically reduce the amount of crops that they are growing.

Small farmer Mindy Perkovich is only growing produce on one of her seven acres at this point, and she openly admits that she doesn’t know if she will even have enough water for that…

Perkovich typically grows things like turnips, squash and tomatoes for the local market on seven acres. This season, though, she’s had to cut her crops down to less than a single acre.

“We don’t know if we’re gonna have water to keep that alive,” she says. “Financially, I can’t really even express how dramatic it’s changed in the last couple years, water-wise, because without water, we can’t grow crops without crops, we have nothing to sell to our consumers.”

Agricultural production in the western states will be lower than originally anticipated this year, and that will also put upward pressure on food prices in the coming months.

#5 On top of everything else, an enormous plague of grasshoppers is now causing massive headaches for farmers in our western states.

As I discussed on Sunday, the extremely hot and extremely dry conditions are perfect for grasshoppers, and they have been multiplying like crazy.

In some areas, the swarms are so thick that “it can appear the earth is moving”, and there are times when the swarms are so large that they are actually appearing on radar.

Seven states are being hit particularly hard, and the federal government is going to begin a large scale spraying campaign.  The spraying may reduce the plague, but all of the experts agree that it will not stop it.

Grasshoppers will continue to eat our crops on a massive scale for many months to come, and this is another factor that will be driving up food prices.

So, to summarize, the outlook for the months ahead is rather bleak.

A number of factors are going to combine to push prices significantly higher, and so if you can afford to stock up you should be doing so.

Our leaders continue to insist that this bout of inflation is just “transitory”, and you can believe them if you like.

But the truth is that high inflation is here to stay, and what we have experienced so far is just the tip of the iceberg.

***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

About the Author: My name is Michael Snyder and my brand new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available on Amazon.com.  In addition to my new book, I have written four others that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The EndGet Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned)  By purchasing the books you help to support the work that my wife and I are doing, and by giving it to others you help to multiply the impact that we are having on people all over the globe.  I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse BlogEnd Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe.  I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article.  The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.  I encourage you to follow me on social media on FacebookTwitter and Parler, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help.  During these very challenging times, people will need hope more than ever before, and it is our goal to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as we possibly can.

On The Verge Of The Unthinkable

Over the past couple of years we have become accustomed to expecting the unexpected, but soon we many have to start anticipating the unthinkable.  In this article, I am going to be discussing a couple of potential scenarios that would have been unimaginable to the vast majority of Americans just a few short years ago.  Unfortunately, our world is now changing at a pace that is absolutely breathtaking, and many things that were once “unimaginable” could soon become reality.

Let’s start by talking about the record-setting heat wave which is making the epic megadrought in the western half of the country even worse.  Many western farmers planted crops this year hoping that weather conditions would eventually turn in their favor, but that has definitely not happened.  In fact, at this point 88 percent of the West is experiencing at least some level of drought.

2021 has been the worst year of this multi-year megadrought so far, and last week was the worst week for this drought up to this point in 2021.  Old temperature records were shattered all over the West, and some areas were already seeing triple digits by 8 o’clock in the morning

The West is in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave this week, as all-time records were shattered and daily records broken in over a dozen states.

Even by desert standards, the heat wave in the Southwest is atypical. On Thursday, the National Weather Service in Tucson tweeted that the city recorded a temperature of 100 degrees at 8:14 a.m., the second earliest time in the day recorded since 1948.

That is crazy.

Can you imagine hitting triple digits before you have even finished your morning coffee?

Summer had not even officially begun yet last week, and yet new all-time record highs were being established all over the place

Record-breaking temperatures spread from California to Montana this week. On thursday, the all-time high temperature was tied in Palm Springs, California at 123 degrees, breaking the previous June record of 122 degrees.

Salt Lake City tied its all-time record high of 107 degrees. The old record was notably set in July — when temperatures are usually at their highest for the year in that region. This comes after daily record highs were broken Sunday, Monday and Tuesday in Salt Lake, each with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.

We have never seen anything quite like this in the state of Utah.

More than half of the state is in the highest level of drought, and thanks to dramatic water restrictions farmers are being forced to choose which of their crops will die

With drastic limits placed on what little water he has, Tom Favero said he and many farmers along this west side of Weber County were forced to watch some crops die. “We’ve all made serious choices of what fields we can water and what we can’t,” Favero said.

Another Utah farmer that lost a lot of corn and an entire field of barley said that it really “hurts” to see his hard work go to waste…

Farmer Dean Martini pointed at one of his fields. “That corn there, where I can’t water, I don’t have the water. It makes me sick to see it go to heck like that.”

With limits on amount and time, he said there wasn’t enough water flowing to make it across his fields. While some of the corn dried up, he had to let a whole field of barley go too. “It hurts buddy. That hurts,” Martini said.

Of course this is just the beginning.

If this summer is as hot and as dry as they are projecting, we could see catastrophic crop failures all across the West.

And that is really bad news, because the state of California alone produces more than a third of our vegetables and about two-thirds of our fruits and nuts.

A few years ago, hardly anyone would have imagined that we would be facing a crisis of this magnitude in 2021, but here we are.  Paleoclimatologist Kathleen Johnson is quite “worried” about what will happen this summer, and she is warning that this drought is shaping up to be the worst the region has experienced “in at least 1,200 years”

I’m worried about this summer – this doesn’t bode well, in terms of what we can expect with wildfire and the worsening drought. This current drought is potentially on track to become the worst that we’ve seen in at least 1,200 years.

Now I would like to shift gears.

A few years ago, hardly anyone would have imagined that we would be facing a very serious computer chip shortage in 2021.  In particular, the most sophisticated chips are really in short supply, and what most people don’t realize is that “almost all” of them are made by a single company based in Taiwan…

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. chips are everywhere, though most consumers don’t know it.

The company makes almost all of the world’s most sophisticated chips, and many of the simpler ones, too. They’re in billions of products with built-in electronics, including iPhones, personal computers and cars—all without any obvious sign they came from TSMC, which does the manufacturing for better-known companies that design them, like Apple Inc. and Qualcomm Inc.

Because manufacturing those chips is so exceedingly complicated, other companies can’t just plop down new factories and start pumping out their own chips.  Business leaders in the U.S. are now planning new factories, but it could take quite a few years before they are up and running.

So even under ideal conditions, the chip shortage will not be resolved for some time.

But what happens if China invades Taiwan within the next several years?  This is something that U.S. officials were warning about earlier this month

Concerns are growing in Washington over the possibility that China could try to invade Taiwan in the next few years.

Top U.S. military officers have warned in recent months that Beijing might try to make the explosive move this decade, and recent saber rattling, including a Chinese military amphibious landing exercise near the island, is further raising the alarm.

Can you imagine the chaos that it would cause for the global economy if the primary supply of advanced chips was suddenly cut off?

According to the Wall Street Journal, TSMC currently makes “around 92% of the world’s most sophisticated chips”…

Its technology is so advanced, Capital Economics said, that it now makes around 92% of the world’s most sophisticated chips, which have transistors that are less than one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Samsung Electronics Co. makes the rest. Most of the roughly 1.4 billion smartphone processors world-wide are made by TSMC.

Without TSMC, the global economy as it is structured today would not be able to function.

So the fact that China is being more aggressive than ever with Taiwan should deeply alarm all of us.  For example, check out what happened just last week

China has flown 28 warplanes into Taiwan-controlled airspace, the biggest sortie of its kind since the Taiwanese government began publishing information about the frequent incursions last year.

The flights are widely seen as part of an effort by Beijing to dial up pressure on Taiwan, a self-governed democracy of about 24 million people off the Chinese coast that the Chinese government considers a part of China.

We should have never allowed ourselves to become so dependent on foreign chips, but we did.

And now experts are telling us that the chip shortage will last into next year under the best of conditions…

Dimitris Dotis, the Audi brand specialist at Audi Tysons Corner dealership in Virginia, summed up the situation to customers. “Almost all microchips that go into all new vehicles including Audi come from TSMC in Taiwan,” he wrote. “They expect bottlenecks in the supply chain to last through 2022.”

Of course if China does decide to invade Taiwan, the U.S. military will respond, and that would mean no advanced chips for us for the foreseeable future.

In this article, I have shared just two potential scenarios which could soon plunge us into unthinkable nightmares.

Needless to say, there are many, many more crisis points that bear watching right now as well.

We have reached such a critical moment in our history, and I expect global events to accelerate even more as we head into the second half of 2021.

***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

About the Author: My name is Michael Snyder and my brand new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available on Amazon.com.  In addition to my new book, I have written four others that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The EndGet Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned)  By purchasing the books you help to support the work that my wife and I are doing, and by giving it to others you help to multiply the impact that we are having on people all over the globe.  I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse BlogEnd Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe.  I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article.  The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.  I encourage you to follow me on social media on FacebookTwitter and Parler, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help.  During these very challenging times, people will need hope more than ever before, and it is our goal to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as we possibly can.