(The Epoch Times)—The United States has nearly 2 million active farms, and researchers say the existing agricultural model could feed 146 percent of the population by 2030. Nevertheless, the United States imported close to $205 million in food products last year, according to the Department of Agriculture (USDA).
It’s another milestone in the more than decade-long trend of increasing reliance on food imports. Historically, this has been blamed on everything from high volumes of food waste to a booming population, but insiders say profitability is the main roadblock keeping America reliant on foreign foods.
“I think the biggest problem is not the model, but growing season, economics, profits, [and] market demand,” David Anderson, professor and extension specialist for livestock and food product marketing at Texas A&M University, told The Epoch Times.
When asked what would need to change in the U.S. agricultural model to pivot toward growing more crops for domestic consumption, Anderson said: “I think we can physically grow more vegetables, but are they what people want, when they want them, and at a profitable price? Marketing windows prevent some crops from being profitably grown.
“We often have higher costs than crops from other countries.”
Major agricultural producers such as Mexico, China, Brazil, and India have looser regulations, long growing seasons, and cheap labor, making a lot of the production costs cheaper than in the United States. That’s why imported food has generally been cheaper than its domestic competition.
“Farmers produce what is most profitable,” Anderson said.
“Profits are not only determined by price and production costs but what they can actually grow. Not all crops can be grown everywhere.
“Sometimes I can grow a crop but can’t grow it for a profitable price. The yields might be too low or too inconsistent.”
Double-Edged Sword
Troubles turning a profit have led to a sharp decline in homegrown fruits and vegetables over the past few decades. The USDA has observed steady growth in imported fresh produce since the mid-1990s.
In a 2024 interview with NTD News, the president of the Carolina Farm Trust, Zack Wyatt, highlighted how a lack of profitability, foreign competition, and a lack of subsidies have essentially crushed the domestic produce market.
“It feels like the system incentivizes small farmers to go out of business,” Wyatt said. “The more reliant we are on importing food, the more we’re reliant on power. If we can’t feed ourselves, what happens next?”
However, Anderson pointed out that trying to scale up domestic production and decrease reliance on imports is a double-edged sword.
“Imports make food cheaper for consumers,” he said. “If we were to ban or curtail food imports, we would find a lot more seasonality in our food choices at the store. Imports allow us to have year-round supplies of many fruits and vegetables. I think that is good for consumers too.”
The United States imported nearly $30 million in fruit and more than $21 million in vegetables last year, according to USDA research. In a 10-year snapshot, it marks a sharp increase from the less than $16 million in fruit and $11 million in vegetables imported in 2015.
But the soaring imports aren’t limited to fresh produce. The volume of foreign grains, meat, and dairy entering the United States has also risen in the past 10 years.
Moreover, Anderson pointed out that not all U.S. produce is grown for direct consumption, but for other products. He gave the example of domestically produced tomatoes, many of which go into other items such as sauces or soups, cutting down on the number of actual tomatoes available to meet fresh market demand.
Millions of acres of American farmland are dedicated to crops grown for ethanol and seed oils. Roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn production is for ethanol and other products. Additional crops are grown for “oilseed” purposes, like soybeans, rapeseed, palm, and sunflowers. Soybeans alone account for more than 80 million acres of U.S. cropland and represent 90 percent of total domestic oilseed production.
At the end of the day, Anderson said, what producers grow is dictated by dollars and cents.
“We might grow a lot more things if [market] prices were high enough. But that creates a problem for consumers: To get the price high enough to produce them would mean few could afford them.”
Aaron Ristow, senior agricultural specialist at American Farmland Trust, also thinks high input costs keep American farmers from scaling up domestic food production.
“Other countries don’t have to pay as much, so their products can be bought cheaper here. I think we’re able to compete, but the cheaper labor and lack of regulations other countries have would be a threat,” Ristow told The Epoch Times.
Working with farmers in New York, Ristow said there’s no shortage of hurdles to increasing domestic food production.
“There’s things like extreme weather conditions. Even if we’re getting the same amount of rainfall, we get extended dry periods, then a lot of intense rain suddenly. The runoff and erosion are problematic and can wipe out crops,” he said.
Ristow noted that farms are increasingly under fire from urban expansion. He said that many farmers deal with consistent complaints about the noise of farm machinery and the smell of animals.
“People buy a house because they like the views of the countryside, but they don’t like the smell of manure or getting stuck behind farm equipment while driving down the road,” he said, calling it an “invisible wall” for American farmers.
Moreover, Ristow said there’s not much incentive for producers to take a chance on growing more crops or making drastic changes in their methods. With volatile market prices, hidden costs, and other pitfalls, many simply can’t afford to take the risk, he said.
Cost-Price Squeeze
When it comes to federal subsidies for struggling farmers, Ristow said there are roadblocks there, too.
“There’s money out there, but more financial support for farmers is needed as they transition into a more sustainable system,” he said.
Anderson agreed that farmers are in a tough spot.
“I think all of our crop farmers are struggling financially, commodity prices are low. While production costs have increased, the prices for the crops we sell have not increased. That has created a cost-price squeeze,” he said.
In a May commodity markets outlook report, the World Bank forecast that agricultural prices would slowly decline in 2025 and drop by 3 percent in 2026. Much of this is due to improved global supply conditions.
“The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) works to improve domestic and international opportunities for U.S. growers and producers. AMS works with a variety of organizations to support rural America and the nation’s agricultural sector,” a USDA spokesperson told The Epoch Times.
Claims that large-scale producers of corn, soy, wheat, cotton, and rice receive the lion’s share of available federal money have been ongoing for years.
Federal farm subsidies have been under a magnifying glass since 2023, when the Environmental Working Group released an analysis revealing that from 1995 to 2021, the top 10 percent of farm subsidy recipients receiving the largest payments collected more than 78 percent of total commodity program funding. The top 1 percent received 27 percent of subsidy payments.
With a growing list of financial burdens, many family-owned farms are passing into new hands as the older generation retires, Ristow said.
“A lot of the time, the children or other family just aren’t interested in farming,” he said, adding that farmland is being lost at a “high rate.”
Much of this retired farmland is passing to urban developers, which complicates any future possibility of using the land for crops.
“Even if the businesses go out of business, you don’t have the same topsoil anymore. All the life is removed,” Ristow said.
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.
