Editor’s Note: I have never used a Berkey water filter but many if not most of the long-time preppers I respect use them. This could be a major blow to the prepper community, and I’m sure these same silly regulations are going to hit others, including my personal choice at Alexapure. Whatever filter you use, I’d recommend stocking up on replacement filters while they’re still available. Thankfully, most last through thousands of gallons of water each so just a few can last for years. Here’s S.D. Wells with the article from Natural News…
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has decided to ban Berkey water filters, officially labeling them as pesticides. Berkey has sued the EPA in response to their sudden and unorthodox reinterpretation of their own regulations. Berkey water filters are regarded by many as some of the best filters money can buy, and several of Berkey’s products have been featured on Good Morning America, Martha Stewart, Food Network, Thrillist, Goop and Forbes. Berkey products, which have been on the market for a quarter century, became popular due to their gravity purifier and filtering elements that can remove hundreds of waterborne pathogens and contaminants.
According to Berkey’s website, their products can “dramatically reduce bacteria like E. coli, Chlorine, Chloramines, Parasites, Fluoride, Heavy Metals, Inorganic Minerals, Trihalomethane (THMs), Pharmaceuticals, Petroleum Contaminants, Bisphenol-A (BPA), Perfluorochemicals (PFOAS), Herbicides & Pesticides, Protozoa, Inorganic minerals, VOCs, Petroleum products, Perfluorinated chemicals, Rust, Silt, Sediment, and even Radiological.”
One of the main elements in Berkey water filters that contributes to their successful purification is silver. Silver is an active ingredient in many pesticides, thus partly explaining the EPA’s decision to label Berkey as such. However, there were several decisions made by the EPA before this nonsensical label that shed greater light on their true intentions.
The EPA announced at the beginning of the COVID “pandemic” that they were considering reinterpreting their own regulations regarding water filters capable of removing viruses. Concerned by this announcement, Berkey owner Jim Shepherd contacted an EPA consultant for guidance. They provided none. In fact, they even told Shepherd that Berkey products were exempt from the reinterpreted regulations.
EPA pretends to care about Americans’ health, but does very little to protect us from contaminants in water
Following his lackluster consultation from the EPA representative, Shepherd decided it was best to continue manufacturing Berkey products. Shepherd was confident Berkey products were not only safe for the American people, but also incredibly helpful. Arguably the most important role that Berkey filters play in terms of American health is their removal of fluoride. According to a Harvard study, “results support the possibility of adverse effects of fluoride exposures on children’s neurodevelopment.” The EPA identifies fluoride as a dangerous chemical, yet the US government still introduces it to the public water supply to supposedly reduce tooth decay.
As the EPA continued to review its regulations, they did not do anything to reduce the amount of fluoride being spoon-fed to the American people in their tap water. But what they did do was begin banning the filtration product companies that provide effective ways to remove the fluoride. Shepherd said that representatives of the EPA have shut down Berkey’s production plants and delivered stop sale orders to their part manufacturers.
Currently, all Berkey products are listed as unavailable on their website. Shepherd said that he may be faced with having to lay off over 500 American workers if he is unsuccessful in his litigation.
Why would the EPA, out of nowhere, change their minds about this company that so clearly creates a positive impact on American society and health? Even more puzzling is the timing of the decision. As pawns of the Biden administration seem to be preparing for a revamp of COVID, the federal government wants to make water filters that remove the virus unavailable to the American people. Interesting.
Berkey water filters are some of the best filters money can buy, by the way. Use their website below to cover how they filter like 99% of all contaminants, including fluoride, which can cause cancer, brittle bones and lowered IQ. Keep your truth news in check by adding Preparedness.news to your favorites list and tuning in daily for updates on real news about surviving and thriving in the near future, and news that’s being scrubbed from MSM and social media as you read this.
Sound off about this on the Late Prepper Substack.
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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.
I read some discussion online that the government/FDA/etc. are considering adding pharmaceuticals or other agents to the water supply, to make sure all people are “protected”. I don’t know if it’s true, but after witnessing government and agency corruption being exposed the last few years IT WOULDN’T SURPRISE ME ONE BIT.
Wow, just read up on this article thoroughly, and watched the Mike Adams interview with the owner. And read through the reddit threads, and watched the recent Berkey water test results vid from a youtube water testing channel. And read more and more and more. The epa labeling is a sham, incompetent morons in government. Supposed aluminum results in testing is not accurate because the testing facilities do not distinguish between inert and elemental, or something along those lines, so I’m not concerned about that either.
Conclusion; I’m still going with Berkey, but may be rushing some additional sticks just to be on the safe side. I’ve got an email out to one of the authorized suppliers whom still has stock. And that’s going to be www dot myberkey dot com. Thanks. Still to this day, missing their easy to use shower filter they used to sell. If I’d have known they’d discontinue that really awesome product, I’d have bought ten of them to last the next decade. The new ones are junk, just like crystal quest and the rest of them, disposable trash. On the bright side, there are a lot of really knowledgable people online talking about water filtration, which is helpful and finally more people are paying attention. Sadly, still appears quite difficult to simply purchase an effective water harvesting device for household residential use. One great thing from this unexpected multi hour research call, as this is alarming news to ban the Berkey, (of all the things, bozos in government), I learned about a good brand which with a 2k to 3k investment, can filter your entire home and this looks like a great product. That would be the ProOne Pro Home whole home in line water filter set. (I’ll pass on the softener, lol).
Berkey is an excellent product and it does exactly what it advertises. Doulton and Aqua-Cera are good too. Whatever you do, I would definitely buy 5 or 10 for emergency use. They run from 39 dollars up to a hundred for the filters only. Very Cheap insurance. For what the Federal government wasted in Flint Michigan, they could have bought everyone there a Berkey and still had money leftover.