Growing Agricultural Failure

A worldwide farming crisis looms

Drone capture of the biblical scale flooding of Pakistan in 2022. The floods affected 33 million people, displacing at least 8 million. Losses to food, livestock, and fisheries came to $3.7 billion US. Long-term losses are estimated at $9.24 billion US ($1.98 trillion in Pakistani rupees). Pakistan’s GDP for 2025-2026 could be as low as zero and one percent as a result with inflation driven by food insecurity.

“We have a lot of people that are unemployed that have no idea of getting a job. They love the system, they don't have to work, they're being taken care of, and it's a problem... You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster, then you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be, when we were great.” — Donald Trump on “Fox & Friends,” 2014

In the first eight months of this administration, Donald Trump and cohorts have launched a withering attack on Democracy, a plan published without fear of failure in the 920-page blueprint of Project 2025. While Trump is merely a kleptocrat easily used as a frontman by far more intelligent, but equally evil people — racists, billionaire tech bros, and Christian nationalists — the agenda of the project built year after year beginning with the policies of the Reagan administration has become a blitzkrieg. Nazi reference intended.

BTW, that economic crash is under way, as Trump attempts to make billions on crypto schemes, saddles Americans with tariffs, effectively a tax, and deports or incarcerates essential immigrant workers without legitimate charges or due process. The vast majority are here legally.

As the ICE gestapo rolls across the country, agricultural workers are among the victims, low paid workers who put dinner on our tables. Among the states affected are California, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Just yesterday, arrests of farmworkers occurred near me in western, NY.

We are witnessing the depths which the worst of our ill engineered society breeds — sociopath billionaires run amuck from the power of uncontrolled wealth profiting even from mass murder, the Gaza Genocide. This has been fomented by hundreds of billions of dollars of US weapons sales to Israel, both historically and contemporarily under both Biden and Trump. Examples of billionaire benefits? I’ll name just two. Bill Gates’ Microsoft cloud being used for assisting mass surveillance of Palestinians, and Peter Thiel’s Palantir software contracts enabling more efficient murder and maiming of civilians, aid workers and journalists, “digital kill chains” in AI enhanced drone attacks, then labeled as “mistakes” by Israel. Oops. And now, Palantir is assembling a one button database on you.

A bloodied Palestinian child in the ruins of an Israeli bombardment, Gaza, Palestine, October. 25, 2023. Assist credits for Bill Gates and Peter Thiel. AA photo. Entire photo essay here.

The version of reality these people live in does not include you, me or those you love. Their wealth and power make them gods in their sociopath minds. They believe the extraction of the planet has no limits as it is drilled, mined, and polluted to the point of mass extinction. Their power is evidence, morals be damned, that they are the rightful inheritors and deciders of who gets what’s left as the planet heats, and the biosphere gasps.

Technology will save us we’re told, AI the latest jammed down our throats. Bullshit. Technology is being used for enslavement.

The goal embodied in Trump’s quote is chaos that divides us and paves an easier path for the predators to complete their absolute control. The hidden agenda? The most rapid population reduction possible. Why? Because the tech bros recognize the end of oil on the horizon — just 40 to 60 years according to longtime industry oil geologist Art Berman, and the Christian nationalists persecuting brown people are looking forward to the end of days.

If you’re not one of them, consider yourself a Palestinian. Genocide and slavery is in the DNA of America. Ask any Native American or person of a color. Speaking truth to the state or reading a banned book will soon get us locked up or worse. They don’t intend to stop with immigrants.

These horrors will be infinitely exacerbated by climate change. We’re staring at global societal and economic failure as droughts, floods, and storms destroy the foundation of society, agricultural and lead to billions of climate migrants. It’s already under way. Zurich insurance estimates 1.2 billion displaced by 2050.

Agriculture: There’s no civilization without it

Civilization is built on agriculture, originating in the Fertile Crescent around 12,000 years ago in the modern day countries of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, parts of Turkey and Iran. Agriculture developed in China a few thousand years later, around 9000 BCE, and then in Mesoamerica, (present-day Mexico and Central America) with the cultivation of maize around 7000 BCE. Compared to nearly 200,000 years of our ancestors hunting, gathering and scavenging for survival, agriculture is a recent advance in human society, and most would agree a desirable one. However, the version powered by fossil fuels has exploded our population from one just billion in 1804 to over eight billion today. This will not be sustained as EROI on oil diminishes. Fracking has been evidence, projects requiring more energy yielding diminishing returns. As mentioned, Art Berman estimates the remaining window for oil extraction at 40 to 60 years in this encompassing interview.

The fertile crescent arguably birthed modern civilization, even if we are not civilized at all. Modern Israel and Gaza are on this map where 64,000 human beings have been exterminated with western nation assistance, particularly the US.

Contemporary agriculture is entirely dependent on oil. Without fossil fuels for the production of fertilizers and pesticides, and diesel for heavy equipment to till, plant, harvest and transport goods for processing, (more fossil fuels required), modern agriculture becomes impossible. This ensures eventual collapse. In the meanwhile, inflationary pressure on farms will grow.

The past is the future for agriculture

The impending collapse of fossil fuels will demand returning to agricultural practices of the past, meaning human and animal powered local farming, augmented by simple Victorian era style machines. Without diesel, wonders such as GPS guided combines will become useless, rusted hulks.

A good idea of what such a life looks like can be found in this outstanding BBC series, Victorian Farm. The series can be found on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

A near future dinosaur.

Back to the future, methods never abandoned by the Amish.

The multiple crises of agriculture

The dwindling of fossil fuels is not the only threat to agriculture, just the one that undermines its contemporary practice. Other threats, recognized for decades, have been largely left unaddressed. Corporate farming and the power of the petrochemical industry and corporate farming interests that have destroyed the noble dream of family farming. Consider that farmers can’t legally replant their own seeds if under contract to Monsanto, and may be sued even if they’re not under contract. The climate crisis is just one of numerous threats to food on our tables.

Following are what I feel to be the top threats to food security both nationally and internationally, most of which are worsened by climate change. Those who are more expert on agriculture, please weigh in.

The topsoil crisis

The topsoil crisis is neither new nor a mystery. Scientists warn that 24 billion tons of fertile soil is being lost per year due to unsustainable, industrial scale agriculture practices. This article from Scientific American predicts just 60 years of farming left — and that was in 2014. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN warns 90 percent of the world’s topsoil is in danger by 2050.

Industrial farming practices have degraded soil, removed its nutrients, caused it to lose its ability to retain water, and increased our vulnerability to droughts, wildfires, and water shortages. Additionally, the loss of quality topsoil and its organic content resulted in near zero land removal of CO₂ when including trees in 2024. Not only does topsoil degradation threaten unprecedented famine, it eliminates a critical absorber of the fossil fuels we refuse to stop burning.

The urban sprawl crisis

In the US, 2000 acres of farmland are lost each day to urban sprawl. A thorough study of this problem if we continue business as usual has been published by American Farmland Trust, a non-profit dedicated to protecting farmland. Policy to protect farmland and promote sustainable practices should be a no-brainer, but our political leadership is devoid of brains. The Trump administration considers sustainable farming practices “woke.” Limiting tillage, planting soil-enriching cover crops and installing water chutes to control erosion are “far left climate” activities. Billions of dollars in funding support for these efforts have been frozen while the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and White House conduct ongoing “reviews.”

The pollinator crisis

Honeybees are our most well-known pollinators, but there are many others including wild bees, hoverflies, butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, birds and bats. Insect numbers have plummeted in recent decades. The results of a 2017 European study indicate a 75 percent reduction in total flying insect biomass, even in protected areas. In this 2020 study, estimates suggest that insects may number 5.5 million species, of which only one fifth are identified. It states:

The number of threatened and extinct insect species is woefully underestimated because of so many species being rare or undescribed… In total at least one million species are facing extinction in the coming decades, half of them being insects.

Human caused extinction is out of control, we barely have a clue to what we’re losing, and that includes the insects we depend on for food pollination. Insecticides are the obvious culprit, as is loss of natural habitat to cities and in no small irony to farmland, where monocultures replace forests, wild flowers and wild plants, and destroy myriad interdependent species. Insects are lost in these conditions.

In 2022, 50 percent of US managed honeybee colonies died off. This 2025 USDA article reports:

In January 2025, commercial beekeepers began reporting severe losses in commercially managed operations. As losses unfolded, it was evident that over 60% of commercial beekeeping colonies had been lost since the prior summer, representing 1.7 million colonies and an estimated financial impact of $600 million.

The loss of pollinators presents an existential crisis to the world’s food security that is not being adequately addressed. Government should be about protecting its citizens from threats, not promoting destructive practices and technology. We must regain a respect for the intricate, natural workings of the planet which we have far exceeded.

For an amazing study of bees and their surprising lives and social order, consider watching this remarkable study produced by a filmmaker in his backyard garden during the Covid lockdown. It’s revelatory and fascinating.

The climate emergency

When I was born, CO₂ in the atmosphere stood at 318 ppm (parts per million). Today, it stands at nearly 428 ppm. Before the industrial age as measured by ice cores, CO₂ stood at 280 ppm and the correlation between CO₂ and a warming planet is proven beyond a doubt, deniers be damned. Other GHGs such as methane (CH₄), and nitrous oxide (N₂O) are less prevalent and shorter lived, but far more powerful traps for the sun’s heat.

We and the animal and plant life we depend on have evolved during a period of temperature conditions for which we are narrowly adapted. Wet-bulb temperature deaths are one easy measure of our limitations.

Earth’s temperature over 500 million years

Ice core samples measuring atmosphere back 800,000 years

Pakistan represents one of the most severe consequences of climate change through flooding to date, $3.7 billion US in losses to the agricultural sector alone. The Black Summer of Australia represents the other extreme, out of control fire that resulted in 16 million hectares burned and $5 billion in losses to farmers. They are just two extreme disasters in a world where such occurrences are rising rapidly. No nation, no economy can withstand such blows repeatedly, and these disasters run into the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. Storm Debby was a mere Category 1 event in August 2024 that caused over $12 billion in destruction because of its slow speed from carrying more water from climate change. I wrote of it because I knew it would quickly be forgotten. Then came Category 4 Hurricane Helene just weeks later which I wrote of as well in, When is the Point of no Return? Helene cost around $150 billion, and reached inland all the way to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

These are not your grandfather’s storms.

Horseshoe Beach, Florida. Photo: Chandan Khanna AFP

The California economy alone, deeply based on agriculture, now the fourth-largest in the world, has been in a one-in-1200 year drought as snow pack on the mountains disappear. Ever more dependent on pumping aquifers to the point of the ground collapsing, gleaning the severity of the drought is easily accomplished through tree ring records.

Without food security, there is NO security, and this should be a primary subject of coordinated worldwide discussion and planning. Instead, we’re offered massively taxpayer subsidized oil, the root of our problems, genocide and budding fascism in growing techno dystopia. Each of us must fight for our future.

Losing the California economy to climate change would shake not just the US, but the world. Agriculture is the foundation of any semblance of global security.

This California drought map can be found here.

The insurance crisis

We’re all familiar with the pain of paying for insurance. However, it’s foundational to the economy, and if it fails so too shall the economy. In the US, swathes of California, Florida, and Louisiana are becoming uninsurable as the industry pulls out from ever greater climate disasters. If you think my opinions are too “green,” look no further than the insurance industry for cold-nosed actuary analysis.

Climate-fueled disasters cost America almost a trillion dollars over the last year.

State Farm has stopped issuing policies for new construction in California. California homeowners are losing policies deemed too risky because of longer, more destructive fire seasons. Insurance claims for the January LA fires could exhaust the state’s $21 billion fund for utility caused fires.

Property insurance is becoming unaffordable or unavailable for coastal Louisianans even as climate warming LNG terminals spring up with impunity.

Skyrocketing insurance rates in Florida are causing homeowners to relocate while they can. There’s more than one way for a property to go underwater. Unavailable mortgage insurance is one of them. Since 2022, average premiums have increased 30.7 percent for homeowners and 28.8 percent for condo owners.

BTW, our erudite Senate is well-aware.

Who else carries insurance? Well, farmers do, on millions of dollars of land, crops structures, equipment, and livestock. What happens if insurers pull out of farms at risk or premiums become unaffordable?

Unnecessary crisis: Attacks on science and critical agencies

I have mentioned Trump’s tariffs, his administration’s freezing of funds promoting sustainable farming practices and the attack on workers who are responsible for physically harvesting and processing our food. These attacks carried out illegally, on a daily basis harm all of us. These actions are destroying the economy across all sectors, perhaps the most obvious one embodied in rising prices at the grocery store. Even the most myopic climate change denying capitalists are becoming unsettled.

The most cynical ones funding our extinction like Morgan Stanley recommend buying stock in air conditioning as the planet becomes hotter.

Trump has even cancelled $1 billion in funding for schools and food banks to buy food from local suppliers.

Elimination of USAID which comprised less than one percent of the federal budget destroyed enormous markets for US farmers, and it is estimated to result in more than 14 million additional deaths globally by 2030, including 4.5 million deaths of children younger than five years old. It has also eliminated nearly 20,000 American jobs and over 230,000 globally.

Trump got elected in part by promising the oil industry elimination of agencies and hard won laws if they filled his war chest with $1 billion in contributions. These laws were already inadequate, and constantly under attack, as evidenced by the rapidly declining state of the planet. This administration’s attacks on the EPA, DOE, NASA and NOAA by appointing industry cronies, cutting budgets to the bone, and firing government workers with vast knowledge of the issues we face is resulting in the worst possible scenario, the acceleration of climate change and in turn the growing potential of catastrophic agriculture failure. How does zero dollars in climate research sound? How about ceasing the collection of GHG emissions from polluters?

Trump and his cronies are both numbingly ignorant and deliberately malevolent in their intent, undermining the hope of salvaging what we can from what is already a triage situation. The problem isn’t with scapegoated government workers. It’s with those beholden to AIPAC and oil money who have no clue the planet has limits, no souls, and a rapacious hunger to fill their inner void. Money and power, the only things they understand can never fill what they’re missing, and they’re on course to take us all down in a flood of sociopathic ignorance and hatred.

There is no liberal or conservative, only the absolute need for united recognition of the limits of our planet. All else is insanity.

Trump does have a point. Nothing will Make America Great Again like food and water shortages resulting in riots as a rationale for the oligarchs to clench us in the fist of fascism. Destitution is a powerful tool. Unlike you, reading this difficult article to the end, most are ignorant and easily manipulated. The economy crashing, the country going to total hell, and everything becoming a disaster is the goal.