by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:
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”…
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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.
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.
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