Did you know that we are in the middle of the worst bird flu outbreak ever recorded? Millions upon millions of birds have been dying, and most people don’t even realize that such a nightmarish pestilence has been absolutely devastating North America and Europe. But what people do know is that eggs, chicken and turkey just keep getting more expensive at the grocery store. In fact, supplies are starting to get so tight that some experts are now talking about the potential for “shortages” during the holiday season. Unfortunately, this epidemic isn’t going to go away any time soon. If it was going to go away, it would have done so during the warm summer months. Now the weather is starting to get colder again, and that means that it will be even easier for the bird flu to spread.
What we are witnessing in Europe right now is truly alarming. According to the official website of the European Food Safety Authority, so far 47.7 million birds have been culled by poultry facilities where cases of the bird flu have been confirmed…
The ongoing HPAI season has produced the largest epidemic seen so far in Europe, with a total of 2,467 outbreaks in poultry and 47.7 million birds culled in affected establishments. In addition, 187 detections were notified in captive birds and 3,573 HPAI events were recorded in wild birds. The geographical reach of this year’s epidemic is unprecedented, with reported cases ranging from the Svalbard islands in Norway to southern Portugal, and as far east as Ukraine, affecting 37 European countries in total.
Just think about that.
At a time when agricultural production is way down all over Europe, this pestilence has already wiped out almost 50 million chickens and turkeys.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. The bird flu outbreak in Europe was supposed to greatly subside once summer arrived, but this year that didn’t happen…
In past years, outbreaks of avian flu declined with warmer weather and the end of migration by wild birds in the autumn and winter.
But outbreaks have continued across the UK and elsewhere in Europe this summer leading to fears that highly pathogenic variants of avian flu are now endemic in wild birds, creating a risk of infection all year.
So what does this mean?
Has bird flu developed into a form that is not greatly affected by warmer temperatures?
The truth is that we just don’t know.
But what we do know is that bird flu is usually at the worst during the fall and winter…
Bird flu usually strikes during the autumn and winter months. It is transmitted by infected migrating wild birds’ faeces or direct contact with contaminated feed, clothing and equipment.
“As autumn migration begins and the number of wild birds wintering in Europe increases, they are likely at higher risk of HPAI infection than previous years due to the observed persistence of the virus in Europe,” Guilhem de Seze, a senior official at the EFSA, said in a statement on Monday.
So things in Europe are not likely to get better any time soon.
Instead, in all probability they will probably get even worse.
Meanwhile, the bird flu continues to sweep across North America as well. At this point, the total death toll on our side of the Atlantic Ocean has reached approximately 50 million…
In North America alone, an estimated 50 million birds have succumbed, which experts say is probably a vast undercount. And though government officials are primarily concerned about poultry farms, the epidemic has struck wild birds, too — from waterfowl to raptors and vultures.
If we add 47.7 million dead birds in Europe to 50 million dead birds in North America, that gives us a grand total of 97.7 million dead birds.
And the vast majority of those dead birds are chickens and turkeys.
This is truly catastrophic, and most people aren’t paying attention.
But whether people are paying attention or not, prices are just going to keep going higher at the grocery store…
The surge of the flu has led to the price of turkey hens rising 30% higher than last year and 80% higher than before the pandemic, and it appears unlikely that will change before the holidays. “There’s nothing appearing on the horizon to suggest anything new is going to surface to help ease the supply-side pain for Thanksgiving turkeys,” Russ Whitman, senior vice president at commodity researcher Urner Barry, told Bloomberg.
And the word “shortage” is increasingly being used to describe what we could be facing this upcoming holiday season…
A turkey shortage may impact what’s on the table this holiday season. Grocers and delis alike are running out of the meat, driving the price of poultry even higher amid inflation.
Why aren’t more people talking about this?
For a moment, try to think of how many things you eat regularly that contain chicken, turkey or eggs.
Now imagine what would happen if all of those products disappeared.
With each passing month, the bird flu continues to spread to more locations. Right now, southern California has become one of the latest hotspots…
After proliferating globally, a historic wave of avian flu has entered Southern California, where it is worrying farmers and bird lovers and could add to complications with supply chains and food prices.
Already, poultry operations have had to euthanize domestic flocks of chickens and turkeys, while thousands of wild birds have also died. Wildlife experts say they are seeing a wave of dying birds moving south — already as far as Irvine — as the fall migration sets in.
This is a slow-motion nightmare that is playing out right in front of our eyes.
But what would make this disaster far, far worse is if bird flu mutates into a form that can spread easily among humans.
Normally, it is quite difficult for a human to catch H5N1, but when it happens the death rate is extremely high…
But worldwide, between January 2003 and 31 March 2022, there have been 863 cases of human infection with avian influenza A (H5N1) virus reported from 18 countries. Of these 455 cases were fatal.
If a mutant form of H5N1 comes along that easily passes from person to person, the panic that would cause would make the COVID pandemic look like a Sunday picnic.
So let us hope that does not happen any time soon.
Unfortunately, I believe that we are living during a time when great pestilences will become increasingly common.
In secret labs all over the globe, mad scientists are monkeying around with some of the most deadly diseases that humanity has ever known.
It is way too easy for a “mistake” to happen, and as we have seen once a dangerous bug does get loose it can circulate around the planet in the blink of an eye.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written five other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, “Get Prepared Now”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending digital copies as gifts through Amazon to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
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Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
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.
Would not be the least surprised if this were man-made.