Samuel Fisher, owner of Golden Valley Farms, is being persecuted by the U.S. government all because his family raises their own animals, slaughters the meat on the farm, and sells that meat to the community. Mr. Fisher is a mild-mannered, father of five who owns and operates a 100-acre cattle farm in the heartland of Virginia. The farm began five years ago selling milk, cream, and yogurt, before they began to butcher and sell their own meat. Now the farm is under attack by government operators who are trying to shut the farm down and stop the man from feeding his own family.
(Article cross-posted from Natural News)
Amish farmer who feeds hundreds of people in the community, under attack
“This ain’t right. We had all this meat. We worked hard to get it in the freezer, process it, package it,” said Mr. Fisher in an interview with Townhall. “The next day. They came with a search warrant, went through everything, the house, every building, the barn. They just raided through everything. We can’t touch it. We can’t sell it. We can’t feed our family. We can’t give it away, can’t feed it to the dogs. We can’t do anything with it. They just took it to the dump.”
Mr. Fisher raises and butchers his meat on site and sells it directly to his customers. His farm feeds about 500 people in the community. The Golden Valley Farms membership program allows individuals to own part of Fisher’s herd of 100% grass-fed golden Guernsey cows.
Without warning, an inspector with the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS) paid Golden Valley Farms a visit on June 14th. That day, the government decided to penalize Mr. Fisher for selling meat that was not processed by a USDA-inspected facility.
Innocent farmer is raided, his property seized, for the “crime” of feeding his family and community
When Fisher began selling meat, he went to a USDA inspector and sent the meat to the designated USDA facilities. The butchering and processing through the USDA were slow and cumbersome. Mr. Fisher was unable to ship the required quantity of animals at one time and could not operate economically and in a timely manner to satisfy his customers. “By the time the meat comes back, you might be running low on certain cuts of meat, but what you order from USDA was not accurate to that. You might run out of some stuff long before other stuff because you had to order it so far in advance.”
His customers prompted Mr. Fisher to process the meat on the farm, without a USDA inspection. When the USDA surveyed the customer base, the majority (92%) responded that they wanted the meat processed on the farm, without interference from the government. “You have to keep going because people are depending on this stuff as their medicine. I want this world to have the opportunity of finding real food,” Mr. Fisher said.
Fisher said that the lockdowns in 2020 forced him to wait 8 to 12 months to schedule the butchering process. At that time, his customers were stocking up on meat as stores were running out of supply.
“All of a sudden, we had a lot of need for meat,” Fisher said. “Well, there was no option taking it to USDA facility, so that’s when the trigger was pushed to do it ourselves. Customers were buying mostly from our own meat, not so much from the USDA. Then the pandemic came and there was no other option but either not have it available or process it ourselves. So, we started processing ourselves. We put additions to the building and made a processing room and we certainly like it now.”
Mr. Fisher’s customers preferred that the meat be processed on site. “They own part of the business. They own some of the herd,” Fisher explained. “My thinking was […] We can butcher their cows, process it, and sell it to them. I told the state all of this, but they said, ‘No, there’s no way around that. You can’t do that.’” Fisher said the inspectors asked permission to search the farm. Mr. Fisher denied their request. “And, they told me, ‘We’ll be back,’ and left,” Fisher said.
The state targeted his farm from there forward. They came in and took pictures and lied to the courts, claiming that Mr. Fisher was selling raw meat and was a public health risk. When the state returned to his farm, they raided the freezers and packed a U-Haul truck full of their meat. Mr. Fisher was ordered not to feed anyone again, not even his dogs or his own family. None of these customers have ever gotten sick from his products. Many depend on the products for their health and food security.
But this didn’t matter to the all-powerful state. When Mr. Fisher continued to feed his family and sell food to his community, the state came in with criminal charges and seized his farm. He now has no choice but to fight back against a rogue government.
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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.
