Thanks to the horrific drought which is absolutely devastating ranching in the Southwest, ranchers are now in “panic mode” and are selling off their cattle at an unprecedented rate. In fact, some are choosing to sell off their entire herds because they feel like they don’t have any other options. In recent days, seemingly endless lines of trailers waiting to drop off cattle for auction have gone viral all over social media. Everybody is talking about how they have never seen anything like this before, and if the drought in the Southwest persists the lines could soon get even longer. In the short-term, this is going to help to stabilize meat prices. But in the long-term the size of the U.S. cattle herd will steadily become much smaller, and that has very serious implications for our ability to feed ourselves in 2023 and beyond.
North Texas has become the epicenter for this rapidly growing crisis. Thanks to the drought, there simply is not enough grass and not enough water, and so many ranchers have been forced to make some really tough decisions…
North Texas ranchers are selling off cattle by the thousands as grass and water disappear during an expanding summer drought.
Videos spread on social media Saturday and Sunday, showing trucks and trailers lined up for miles outside of livestock markets.
At the Decatur Livestock Market, owner Kimberly Irwin said trucks were stacked a mile in each direction, eventually unloading more than 2,600 animals.
For many of these ranchers, it is imperative that they get something for their animals while they still can.
According to the USDA, the vast majority of the pasture and range land in the region is now in either “poor” or “very poor” condition…
Grass has stopped growing with no rain and 100 degree temperatures. Grasshoppers have reportedly been destroying what’s available in some counties. Stock ponds are now starting to run low on water as well.
The USDA released a report Monday showing 83% of pasture and range land is now considered to be in poor to very poor condition.
Normally, many cattle ranchers would feed hay to their cattle under such circumstances, but the price of hay has absolutely skyrocketed over the past year…
Prices for hay, which is widely used to feed cattle, were 56% higher in April than in 2021, according to a June report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Cattle producers are estimated to have lost money the past two months, according to a cost-and-return analysis from Iowa State University.
So now even if you can find hay for sale it is usually so expensive that it is simply not economical. Without any other options that make sense, some cattle ranchers in Texas have actually decided to go ahead and sell their entire herds…
Central Texas ranchers have little hay to feed their cows due to drought conditions. That means some ranchers are now selling their entire herds, including older ones who might not thrive in the drier and hot conditions.
“Some of these ranchers are just totally out of grass, totally out of water,” Uptmore said. “Their backs are against the wall and they don’t have any other option.”
The good news is that a flood of beef is coming into the supply chain right now.
And that will certainly help keep short-term prices stable.
But what will we do next year and beyond?
According to Bloomberg, many ranchers that are showing up at these auctions are literally in “panic mode” because they are so eager to sell off their animals…
Ranchers in top cattle state Texas can’t sell their herds fast enough with 100-degree Fahrenheit temperatures making it too expensive to sustain animals.
Costs for feed, fertilizer and fuel have been soaring. There’s also a lack of water in the state, and little hay. That’s resulting in a firehouse of cattle getting auctioned at Texas sale barns. Emory Livestock Auction Inc., just over an hour’s drive east from Dallas, is seeing nearly quadruple normal rates with ranchers in “panic mode,” said Jack Robinson, an 83-year-old auctioneer.
Normally ranchers would wait until their cattle have reached a desired weight before finally selling them off.
Unfortunately, this relentless drought is forcing many ranchers to “sell smaller”…
Cattle rancher Anthony Vybiral, in the business since the 90s, says drought conditions are forcing ranchers like him to “sell smaller.”
During a normal season, calves weigh up to 600 pounds, Vyviral said. Now, the rancher said, “some of them have been weighing 375 to 450 and they’ve been selling them.”
At the end of the day, ranching is a business.
These guys are trying to make whatever money that they can under the circumstances.
Of course most Americans never even think about where the meat that they eat comes from, but we should.
Because as Texas rancher Jarrod Montford has pointed out, we depend on a very small sliver of the population to feed all the rest of us…
“1.6, 1.7% of the population feeds the rest. It’s not how bad are we at the end of the day,” Monfort said. “It’s the fact that if we don’t survive, our nation fails,” said Montford.
He is right.
We need our farmers and our ranchers, and we don’t appreciate them nearly enough.
Looking ahead, there is reason to be extremely concerned.
The national cattle herd has been getting smaller for quite a while, and now that trend threatens to greatly accelerate…
The nation’s cow herd has been shrinking for the past two years, but this summer’s drought is sending much of the breeding herd to the processing plant. That will cut into calf numbers for the next two to three years.
What we desperately need is a break in the weather.
So let us hope for cooler temperatures and lots of rain.
Unfortunately, this next week is supposed to be a sizzler, and that will especially be true in the Southwest…
About 85% of the US population — or 273 million people — could see high temperatures above 90 degrees over the next week. And about 55 million people could see high temperatures at or above 100 degrees over the next seven days.
On Saturday, “sizzling temperatures” will take hold of the Middle Mississippi Valley and Central Plains with temperatures forecast to surpass 100 degrees, the weather prediction center said.
Daytime temperatures could top 100 degrees across much of the Southwest, with some areas exceeding 110 degrees, according to the center.
Of course all of this is happening within the context of the worst global food crisis in decades.
Famines are already erupting all over the world, and global food supplies are getting tighter with each passing day.
We were warned that this was coming, but most people didn’t want to listen.
Now a day of reckoning is nearly upon us.
I would definitely encourage you to stock up on meat in the weeks ahead while it is still relatively cheap, because the outlook for 2023 and beyond is definitely not promising.
***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.
I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.
I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to ask Jesus to be your Lord and Savior today.
Image by wernerdetjen from Pixabay. 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.
That’s right. Wait till next year. Give it two years top for we actualy feel the REAL pain.
There’s no pain if you don’t consume beef
You don’t know what you are taking about. The systems that exist to feed us are very complex and above the intellect of a progressive snowflake. Believe me when I tell you without meat there will be famine. There is not enough rice and beans to feed even half our population. So suck on that.
I feel the pain already. Like Biden, things will get worse. All I can do is pray for our entire food industry that feeds us. Our situation is grim and most Americans are not paying attention, as usual. This will be biblical. 833 days until the election. If we survive. America First. ULTRAMAGA.
1. There have always been droughts. They happen periodically.
2. Summer temperatures in the Southwest always hit 100 degrees or more.
3. Are they shipping the cattle overseas? If not, they’re simply being relocated.
4. Chicken Little BS.
You make a good point but this time it’s sort of “death by a thousand cuts” as inflation, high fuel prices, low availability of everything needed to support a ranch steadily degrades the system.
You can always water cattle. However, Bill Gates, the Chinese, and the U.S. government are buying up farmland and letting it go to waste. That causes a shortage of feed. Supply chain problems (caused by vax & mask mandates on truckers and dockworkers, and skyrocketing gas prices) make it hard to move catlle, feed, and processed beef. More BS from globalists and their Democrat sock puppets.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/19/china-buying-us-farms-foreign-purchase-499893
https://townhall.com/columnists/marthaboneta/2022/01/13/beware-china-is-gobbling-up-american-farmland-n2601760
https://www.technocracy.news/foreigners-own-30-million-acres-of-prime-u-s-farmland/
The enviro-freaks who have stood in the way of water capture and collection bear this calamity. Endangering bait fish and nuisance field mice make these birkenstockers wring their hands in dismay. As a result, our food supply becomes hampered and citizens will suffer.
All this could have been avoided with reasonable and prudent measures, thought out instead of “hair on fire” reactions.