(DCNF)—Drive from Buffalo into Genesee County and you will pass fields that have grown corn and soybeans for generations. Soon, thousands of those acres will be covered by steel and glass. New York state is forcing industrial-scale solar plants onto rural communities that never asked for them, and the people who live there are discovering just how little their voice counts when a governor decides differently.
The Mandate Behind The Mess
New York is tearing up rural communities, wiping out wildlife sanctuaries, and burying prime agricultural soil under solar installation in the name of green energy. The root of this campaign is New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) of 2019, which demands that renewable sources supply 70% of the state’s electricity, that greenhouse gas emissions fall 40% below 1990 levels, and that the state build at least 3,000 megawatts of storage.
The footprint of the 18 solar power plants is staggering. The Cider Solar Farm in Genesee County will cover 4,000 acres, and the Ridge View Solar Farm in Niagara County will take another 2,000. Both were pushed through over the strong objections of the people who farm.
Destroy Wildlife, Redact Key Information
What becomes of the animals living where these panels will sit? The Fort Edward project targets land inside a Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) grassland and bird sanctuary. DEC documents describe the area as critical for breeding grassland birds and wintering raptors.
The site hosts the short-eared owl, a bird so rare that the Grassland Bird Trust counts fewer than 50 breeding pairs in New York. The northern harrier, listed as threatened, hunts there. Fifteen species of reptiles and amphibians already of concern to biologists will lose their homes. These are key indicator species wildlife specialists monitor to judge ecosystem health.
You would expect a state that prides itself on environmental leadership to publish this information without hesitation. Instead, residents who filed Freedom of Information requests for an agency report on the Fort Edward site received a document so heavily blacked out that one local compared it to the redactions in the Epstein files. Why does a government agency need to hide a solar project’s effect on endangered owls?
Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul created the Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission specifically to override the objections of the towns and counties in its path. Critics say the agency exists to cut through red tape, sideline environmental review, and neutralize local pushback so projects move forward regardless of what residents want. That is silencing the communities the state claims to be protecting.
A Federal Reckoning Arrives
By 2026, even New York’s own climate agenda had begun to buckle under the weight of its contradictions, forcing Governor Hochul into a March recalibration of the CLCPA that acknowledged the complaints of rural communities.
Then came a rebuke from Washington. U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, and Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler jointly challenged New York’s approval of solar projects on productive farmland, criticizing the state for not applying federal standards in evaluating its farmland.
And here is the contradiction that should embarrass every official who signed off on the policy. Hochul announced a moratorium of up to a year on new data centers that draw more than 50 megawatts, which typically occupy 15 to 40 acres. Meanwhile, New York has already parked solar complexes on approximately 11,000 acres of federally certified prime farmland and wildlife habitats.
Centuries ago, South American civilizations offered land, crops, and sometimes human lives to appease gods they believed controlled the climate. New York has updated the ritual for a modern audience. It has built altars of solar farms and appointed a priesthood of bureaucrats who redact the evidence of their policies’ destruction.
A government convinced it can control the climate by conquering the countryside is not practicing science. It is imposing an ideology on a citizenry that pays the tribute in property and quality of life.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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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.
