The town of Kearny, Arizona, sits along the Gila River, an hour east of Phoenix, built in the 1950s to house the men who worked the copper mines. About 2,000 people live there. This spring, they came within weeks of having no water at all.
Not because the river vanished. Not because of mismanagement at town hall. Kearny nearly ran dry because of a court decree written in 1935, two decades before the town existed, that placed its water rights at the very bottom of a legal hierarchy nobody in Kearny ever agreed to. When the Gila runs low, Kearny cuts first and cuts deepest, while senior rights holders upstream and down are made whole.
That is the system, and this year the system nearly finished the town off.
A Winter Without Snow
The chain of events was brutally simple. Snowpack in the Gila River watershed collapsed to 2 percent of its normal March levels, and spring streamflow came in at barely a third of average. San Carlos Lake, the reservoir that feeds Kearny, dropped below 1 percent of capacity, holding a mere 389 acre-feet by late May.
By June, the San Carlos Recreation and Wildlife Department closed the lake indefinitely after estimating that approximately 100 percent of its fish had died, their carcasses rotting along the receding shoreline.
Kearny normally uses around 280 acre-feet of water a year. For 2026, its allocation was slashed to 77. Town officials did the math and realized they would hit empty in July.
Mayor Curtis Stacy, in his final year in office, went door to door explaining the emergency. In late March the town imposed its most severe restrictions, banning car washing, lawn watering, and kiddie pools. The Little League field went brown. Fourth of July fireworks were canceled because the town could not spare the thousands of gallons it might take to fight a fire.
By the end of April, residents had cut their water use by 30 percent, and when a temporary reprieve arrived, it came only because communities with senior rights happened not to be calling for their full share at that moment. The town’s public works director, Eric Armenta, had heard the warnings for years.
“But it never did come until now. And it came drastically.”
A rehabilitated old well was supposed to be the backup plan. When it finally came online in mid-July, it produced 40 gallons per minute, short of the 50 the town needed for it to matter. And the mayor is already staring at 2027, when Kearny’s allocation could be zero.
“You can’t stretch zero,” Stacy said.
Local Competence Has a Ceiling
Here is what should unsettle every American watching this story. Kearny did nearly everything right. A responsive mayor whose door is literally open. A public works director putting in 90-hour weeks because his mother and sister live in town and he wants his children to be able to come home someday.
Residents who cut their consumption by nearly a third when asked. This is the picture of local self-government that conservatives rightly champion, and it was not enough, because the ceiling on Kearny’s fate is written into a 91-year-old court document and enforced by water authorities the town cannot vote out.
The lesson is not that local government failed. The lesson is that no amount of shorter showers beats a priority date. When the legal architecture of a resource is rigged against you, virtue and thrift buy time, not survival.
The Bigger Fight Is Weeks Away
Kearny’s crisis is a preview, not an isolated curiosity. The 2007 guidelines governing the Colorado River, which supplies 40 million people across seven states, 30 tribal nations, and Mexico, expire at the end of this year. The Interior Department has committed to finalizing new operating rules by October 1, and Secretary Doug Burgum convened all seven basin-state governors on July 21 in an attempt to break a deadlock that has now blown through multiple deadlines.
They walked away without a consensus agreement.
Kearny is not directly tied to those negotiations, and honest reporting requires saying so. But the Colorado runs on the same seniority principle as the Gila, and Arizona holds some of the most junior rights on the entire system.
When the cuts come, and they are coming, they will fall the way they fell on Kearny, on whoever got there last, regardless of how faithfully they conserved. Cities far larger than a 2,000-person mining town should be studying what happened on the Gila this spring, because arithmetic does not negotiate.
There is something instructive, too, in how Kearny’s people responded. No riots, no despair, no demands for a federal savior. Neighbors wore their laundry a second day, let their lawns die, and kept faith that the monsoons would come. That quiet endurance is the old American inheritance, and it is worth more than any water decree. But endurance deserves better than a legal regime that treats an entire town as an afterthought.
Scripture speaks directly to the God who sees the thirsty: “When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the LORD will hear them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them” (Isaiah 41:17).
The people of Kearny have been praying for rain, and as the mayor watched from a trip out of state, flood watches began lighting up the Gila River Basin as the monsoon season strengthened.
The rains may yet refill San Carlos Lake, as they have before. But the West’s water reckoning will not be washed away with one good storm, and the towns at the bottom of the priority list know it better than anyone.
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.
