They aren't "Calling it" RATIONING | THE SILENT SQUEEZE

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]The saying that there will be gnawing and nashing of teeth is real. This is a possible famine on biblical proportions.

[00:00:08]Get a load of this. 70% of all American farmers are saying that they cannot afford all the fertilizer that they need this year. Now, to be clear, nobody is handing out ration cards and nobody is saying that there's some sort of shortage. But the fact still remains that right now in the middle of the 2026 planting season, less food is being produced. And the thing about this is that most people will not notice it until the prices move much later in the fall. Now, we've seen the pieces of this coming together all over the place. fertilizer prices going through the roof due to global disruptions, water wars across the western United States, water and power wars going on between farmers, ranchers, and losing land to data centers. And now the USDA is even reporting a shift in planted acreage. One of the things that I like to do on this channel is connect the dots. Wait until you see what this corn to soy shift the USDA is reporting does to meat prices and milk prices down the road. Even potatoes are being affected. You know, in the West, water decides what grows and what doesn't.

[00:01:24]Idaho right now is facing a record spring shortfall of 181,000 acret of water. To translate that for you that don't understand acre feet of water, that's enough to cover 181,000 football fields one foot deep. Junior water users in the state of Idaho have already faced curtailment issues this year. There's been some temporary relief, but as we know, their water can get shut off at any given moment in time. That's because they didn't create more water. What they did was they, you know, relieved a little bit of pressure momentarily. If you don't know what's going on in Idaho, I suggest you watch my video. It's titled Cut Off. Bottom line, guys, is that when water gets restricted, entire fields don't get planted. Fertilizer prices have gone parabolic. I'm sure you've heard about this all over the news. It's a very, very big deal for farmers, not just in the US, but around the entire world.

[00:02:18]Now, think about that. This is a very big deal around the entire world. If 70% of US farmers can't afford all the fertilizer that they need for this growing season, think about that across the entire world because that's what we're dealing with. And in a global commodity system, these prices have extraordinary impacts on every food item that's treated as a commodity. That could be corn, that could be soybeans, that could be any of those things. That drives the cost of feed prices up in 6 months. URA up nearly 50%. nitrogen up 30 to 40%. And like I said, this 70% number is coming from the American Farm Bureau's survey of over 5700 farmers.

[00:03:03]And actually, in their survey, 78% of those were all in the southern states.

[00:03:08]Because of this, farmers here in the United States and around the world are cutting back. They have to. There's no other choice. They apply less. They plant less. None of this makes the evening news as a crisis. But where it does show up is quietly lowering yields across the entire continent around the world. The saying that there will be gnawing and nashing of teeth is real.

[00:03:32]This is a possible famine on biblical proportions. We cannot feed 8 billion people around this world without fertilizer. Now, there's lots of regenerative ways of growing crops.

[00:03:46]There's lots of ways that we can grow crops. We can still produce a lot of food, but we cannot do it to the scale of feeding 8 billion mouths.

[00:03:55]Think about that. USDA's March 31st planters report showed these numbers in real time. They showed already that farmers are planning on planting 3.5 million acres less of corn. Now, a lot of that has shifted to 3.5 million acres more of soybeans. Soybeans don't require as much fertilizer. So, we'll go from eating cornbased diets to soybased diets. Real healthy. Bottom line, corn needs heavy nitrogen. Soybeans don't.

[00:04:22]And of course, you're all thinking, "Well, whether it's healthy or not, Charlie, soybeans are still food." But here's the bigger picture here. Corn, not soybeans, is actually the engine behind America's food system. It actually does more than just feed you and I. It feeds the livestock that ends up producing your meat and your dairy.

[00:04:42]These observable shifts driven by cost, driven by input pressure, are quietly changing who can stay in the game and who can't. And think about it this way.

[00:04:52]When independent producers get squeezed out by the system, get squeezed out by these global events, your choices and where your food comes from shrinks right down with them. Right now, grocery stores are still stocked, but the pressure is building very hard upstream.

[00:05:09]That pressure is exactly how tighter supplies and higher prices start to form. Regardless of what people think, it doesn't happen with empty store shelves. It starts with a reduction of output at the source. Less grain is going to lead to higher feed costs, which is going to put further pressure on livestock when we're already at the lowest cattle herd that we've been at.

[00:05:31]And that will ultimately lead to higher prices in meat, higher prices in milk.

[00:05:36]And it doesn't just stay in the beef industry. It it spreads to pork. It spreads to chicken because as one protein source becomes more expensive, the next protein source gets a higher demand. That pushes that protein source up. It's a chain reaction. Now, many of you in our comments often talk about the centralization of our food supply. For those of you who don't know what that means, that means fewer but much larger corporations in control of where your food comes from. What we're seeing here is exactly how centralization can accelerate in practice. Now, this video isn't about panic. It's not about empty shelves tomorrow. But what we're seeing is measurable right now. Higher fertilizer prices, 70% of farmers in the United States saying they can't afford all the inputs that they need, tightening water supplies, and observable acreage shifts. And to be completely honest with you, it explains why food prices for most of us still feel rather expensive. Even though mass media on the news is saying inflation's easing, everything's good. Now, the trick to all this is nobody calls it rationing because it doesn't look like what you would envision to be rationing.

[00:06:54]What it looks like is efficiency. Kind of like a bunch of small decisions that are spread out across the food system.

[00:06:59]But that's how food systems work. They don't break all at once. They slowly tighten over time. The question, and I don't think anybody's really asking this, but some people are. The question isn't whether or not food is still being produced. It is. It will be. The real question is how much less food is being produced and for how long will less food be produced? And with anytime that there's a a retraction in something, who controls the supply that's left? We're going to keep tracking this development because I think it's a very serious development. Everybody around the world, every single farmer, you hear it in Europe, you hear it in Asia, you hear it in India, they're all facing extraordinary input costs in the middle of their planting seasons. They're all having to make difficult decisions. All of those difficult decisions are cumulatively adding up to a major shift in what's being planted, what isn't being planted, what our food supply is going to look like 6 months from now.

[00:08:03]And those shifts in acreage impact not just those products, but every product that they feed, every product that they go into, every product that they support. So, you're looking at an entire shift of availability in our food supply, all happening in real time. And most of you aren't going to notice the impacts for 6 months to a year. When you do, are you going to remember what caused