Once upon a time so-called “preppers” — people who believe they should be prepared for any and all possible scenarios including the great apocalypse — were deemed ‘crazies,’ though mostly by city folks who believe, falsely, that grocery stores magically have endless supplies of food.
The fact is grocery stores don’t have much fresh food stock at all, and limited supplies of long-term shelf items. Once the delivery trucks stop coming, they’ll run out of grub pretty quickly.
What would cause those delivery trucks to stop? Widespread power outages. Large-scale cyberattack on computer systems that run trucking operations. War.
And natural disasters, such as weather.
As reported by Michael Snyder at End of the American Dream, it’s not being discussed much beyond local media reporting, but record cold temperatures have arrived early in the United States this year, and they’re having a devastating effect on crops.
He reports:
The endless rain and horrific flooding during the early months of this year resulted in tremendous delays in getting crops planted in many areas, and now snow and bitterly cold temperatures are turning harvest season into a complete and utter nightmare all over the country.
A Veterans Day report from USA Today noted that it was “beginning to look a lot like Christmas” as cold temperatures swept across the country:
A wintry weather pattern that brought single-digit temperatures and more than a foot of snow to parts of the Upper Midwest rolled across a wide swath of the nation Monday, threatening to break hundreds of records and bring a deep freeze as far south as Florida.
“The coldest surge of arctic air so far this season will bring widespread record low temperatures for much of the central and eastern U.S. even down to the Gulf Coast," Kwan-Yin Kong, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Center, told the paper.
In all, more than 300 low temperature records were expected to fall throughout this week, according to the weather service.
Worse, the cold temps dipped deep into the South, where crops were still set to be harvested. And up north, the temps are even more severe, meaning the crop damage is worse. (Related: These 10 items are cheap now but they will be invaluable after SHTF.)
Wet, cold weather has taken its toll
— North Dakota: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue approved the state’s request for a secretarial disaster designation for 47 counties tied to late season rainfall and a snowstorm in October.
— Minnesota: Gov. Tim Walz asked Perdue last week to declare a disaster in 12 northwestern counties where farmers have been struggling through an unusually poor harvest season. In a letter, Walz told Perdue that unending bad weather had contributed to a difficult harvest season while they were already facing low commodities prices.
— Iowa: According to the Iowa weekly growing season report out last week, the state’s average temperature was 33 degrees, or about 13 degrees below normal. Mason City farmer Kevin Pope said that because of early snow, all harvesting had ceased.
— Ohio: In sum, 14 counties have been declared primary natural disaster areas (including Champaign, Clark and Miami counties). Farmers in these counties are eligible to apply for disaster loans and many will need them.
— Illinois: Historic flooding, the worst in 25 years, has dramatically affected the state’s crops, leaving many farmers scrambling for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Wet conditions earlier this year caused farmers to delay planting spring crops including soybeans and corn.
— Colorado: “There is no doubt that the extreme weather has greatly impacted agricultural producers over the last several years, and 2019 is no exception,” Clarice Navarro, executive director for the Farm Service Agency, told local media.
All of which goes to show that anyone who takes prepping seriously is going to be light years ahead of the majority of Americans who will have nothing if or when the stores run out of produce and other goods to sell because farmers couldn’t grow enough last year.
Sources include:
Please contact us for more information.