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Chris Martenson: Welcome everyone to this Peek Prosperity podcast. I am your host Chris Martenson of course, and today we’re going to be discussing a wide range of things. We’re going to be discussing climate, the grand solar minimum, maybe the great reset, certainly Covid and what’s been going on there, and lots of things around food and the possibility of food shortages with Christian of Ice Age Farmer. Christian, welcome so much to the program. It’s great to have you here.

Christian: Thanks so much Chris. You do great work, and I’m honored to be here with you.

Chris Martenson: Well, thank you. So let’s start here. Your website is iceagefarmer.com. I want to make sure people go there. You’ve got a ton of different places that you can send people to. I want to talk about that in just a second, but first I’ve got this world view about how I organize things. I talk about the three E’s, the economy, energy, and environment. It’s a scaffolding and it’s a way I say, hey, if you understand the world through this scaffolding maybe you could understand where the world is and why it’s going the direction it is or maybe you can predict and get yourself better positioned. You’ve got a framework for it, and I know you’ve spent a lot of time organizing around the grand solar minimum and all that, but what’s your world view and how do you talk to people about it?

Christian: Sure. I do think that the grand solar minimum has really helped to frame a lot of these key issues for me because I’ve been saying like you for a long time different aspects of these agendas and what’s going on in the world, but frequently it seemed as if the establishment or the cryptocracy or whatever you might call it would move more rapidly than they might need to even when it was just advantageous to them, sort of push people along this vector towards tierney and control and centralization even when it was working against them. And it wasn’t until I actually started to look at the natural cycles of the sun, and the fact that we’ve been exiting a relatively stable period of climate on the planet due to the sun exiting this modern maximum that we’ve been enjoying for the last 80-90 years before now.

And so what that means is that the way we grow food on this planet is it’s highly brittle at this point. You know, it’s changed into Rockefeller-driven petrochemical and mono-cropping at scale, which is terrible in a number of ways that we can get into, but mostly it’s just very brittle. It’s very fragile and because it was all stood up during this time of very stable climate, as we exit that, there will be very real food challenges to food production and you see that time and time throughout history as the sun does this because it’s a cycle. It’s a natural cycle. We’ve survived it before, and we can survive it again, but we have set up some systems now that are fragile enough that we’ll have some challenges to overcome as this happens. And yeah, so a lot of those things are coming to fruition now as we’ve exited solar cycle 24 over the last couple years here. We’ve been getting the first taste of that, and I think heading into 2030 is when it’s really going to start to hit home and that for me and I think for a lot of people has really helped to underscore and to understand why these agendas are lurching forward at really a breakneck speed right now. So I think that’s sort of the frame of reference that has been helpful.

Chris Martenson: I want to understand what level of cycles are we talking about. So I’ll ask Livio to pull up this chart. I’m going to speak it to you because you can’t see it, but it’s going to be a chart of the Holocene, which we’ll look back maybe 500,000 years, and you see this little flat period for the last 10,000 years, which is when agriculture developed. That’s one cycle, which it’s been very, very stable. And, prior to that, it was all over the map. Very hard to develop agriculture because I’m talking to you from Western Mass so I think 8000 years ago there was a mile of ice over my head, so obviously not conducive to growing much into that circumstance. So that’s one set of cycles. It’s been very calm for 10,000 years. Are you saying we’re exiting that or are you on a shorter cycle with something about the — you know, we look maybe back to the mini ice age that we saw in the 1700’s. Which cycle are we talking about?

Christian: Exactly. So I’d like to point out first of all that there are a number of cycles here, and everything you just said already makes it clear that this global warming narrative is a complete farce. We’ve been through ice ages and come out of them and vice versa before, so the idea that man has suddenly just thrown the planet off of its wheels is quite ridiculous and laughable. And there are people, to be clear, who make the argument that, yes, we are exiting one of those larger cycles and heading into a deeper ice age. The one that I think we can more conclusively and meaningfully speak to though is more of a 200- and 400-year cycle. When you look back at those time ranges, you see things like, as you mentioned, the little ice age, which overlapped with the Dalton Minimum and the Maunder Minimum.

So the sun goes through a natural — it’s got sort of a natural heartbeat. It’s called a Schwabe cycle. Every 11 years, the sun sort of moves. It goes to a relative maximum and a minimum, and those are called solar maximum when there’s a lot of activity and a lot of sunspots and flaring and activity that offers us some electromagnetic shielding through the influences of space, galactic cosmic rays and these sorts of things, which do have, like I said, very real effects on the climate and our ability to grow crops. They change the jet stream and things like this, and so too with it dropping to a minimum, the solar minimum, and that’s normal. That’s the 11-year sunspot cycle. When you look back at the charts of sunspots, though, you can see that sometimes it will be amplified a bit like the modern maximum, the grand maximum, that this is unambiguously displayed on Wikipedia that, through 2008, we were in the modern maximum. And you can see that it actually sort of amplifies that Schwabe cycle. And then so too are there times during a grand minimum where it will become somewhat muted or even drop off completely as it did during the modern minimum, and that’s when we start to see the colder temperatures.

The jet stream loses its stability and cold air from the artic starts to come down. It’s now called the in the media a polar vortex and vice versa some warm air pockets will sort of sneak up and then go up into the artic and they’ll say, oh my gosh, it’s global warming. So that’s the modern narrative overlay over what is actually just a very natural cycle. Those are called meridional flows when the jet stream gets to be a little wavy, and that’s what I mean when I say we’ve had stable growing seasons in recent times but not as much anymore.

Chris Martenson: When you say a little wavy, I think of it as a — because I’m subject to that polar vortex. Every so often, it just gets blisteringly cold down here, and I think of it kind of like the artic is — cold is a source of energy in a sense, but it’s sort of anti-energy, but there’s an icebox up there. It’s kind of like, if you open your freezer and all this cold air rushed out, you would lose that. So there’s a bank of cold, and when it comes down here — I can tell my from own climate because that cold air comes to me sometimes or sometimes it goes to Russia, but when that happens I know that we’re going to see more ice melt next year because it lost its cold.

It lost it, and when that cold came rushing down here something had to replace it, and it’s usually something warmer. So are you saying that loss of — I don’t know what you’d call it — rigidity? It’s not even that. The jet stream had a really defined pattern for most of my life, and it hasn’t had that same pattern for about the last 5-10 years I would say.

Christian: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And yeah, when you open the freezer door, there’s a time when it’s a little bit warmer in there and you’ll see some of that increased melt. But we’re also making up for it. You know, ice is growing quite rapidly during the cold season right now. So it’s easiest and I think most accurate to describe this as losing the stability of the growing season of these climate conditions.

Chris Martenson: That’s language that’s close to my heart. When I describe it, I talk about climate instability because we need that Holocene stability to grow stuff, right? So you say Iowa is a great place to grow crops because you know, and there a reason for that. There’s stability in the rainfall, temperature patterns, and things like that. So let’s talk about the instability. You know, every news report I’m reading says 2020 is going to be the hottest year on record. This is with a La Nina in place as well. How do you account for that?

Christian: Well, I’ve been saying that for 30 years now. It’s been literally no snow by the year 2000 is the sort of rhetoric we’ve been hearing for my entire life at this point, and we’re hearing AOC and the likes of other newcomers to that scene repeat those words but somehow with new credibility since they’re new on the scene. So I don’t put a lot of faith — in fact, I put very little faith into much of what they say at this point regarding global warming and those effects.

Chris Martenson: Well, from how you track it though, your YouTube channel is full of — and what I love about what you do is you’re talking and everything is sourced, right? So you have articles and maps and you’re really making the case with words but visuals. And you’re backing it up, and so one of the things that you’ve been on for a while is this idea of food fragility, the fragility of the food system. What are you seeing there? Just straight upfront, are there any sort of like warning flags today that you’re looking at? I know you are. And has that trend really increased or decreased over time?

Christian: Without question Chris. So, first of all, I think it’s very informative to look back because otherwise we’re just sort of looking at this small bit of data that we have immediately. But, when you look back at history, and I’ve got a series of resources up at iceagefarmer.com/history where you can look back at the document. You know, we have stories and records of the growing seasons and the effects on people and the famines unfortunately that resulted. So you can look back at the Dalton minimum and the Maunder minimum before and see the stories of Thomas Jefferson writing about how the US corn crop was decimated by frost and by drought around those times. The year without a summer before that, in 1315, there was incredible amounts of people sadly dying in Europe. And so that gives us a pretty good picture of what happens during these times when the sun drops off, and then we just need to overlay that understanding over what’s going on now to sort of get a sense for what will happen now and what we should be doing to accommodate those changes.

And, unfortunately, what we’ve seen in the last year is rather than making any of those changes to try and make our food production systems more diversified and more resilient — and I hope we’ll talk about more of that in this conversation — is that the establishment is doing the exact opposite. They are pushing us further off the ledge, and the goal there is of course is to take total control over the food supply, which will transitively allow them to take more control over the population. So yeah, last year we saw a record-driven plant life after three because of the late flooding in the Midwest, tremendous flooding, and then a very early September blizzard that moved through the Midwest. So again, we see the shortening of the growing season on both sides, and there is also a tremendous drop-off in what’s called growing degree days, which is the amount of heat that’s available to a plant as it grows. It’s just a measure of how much heat is there during the growing season, and it allows us to quantitatively say that there were actually places around the world where you could grow corn and barley or what have you last year that we now cannot. And this trend has been continuing over the last three years as well. So yeah, there are a number of pieces of data and trends that absolutely speak to not just the fragility of our food systems, but it’s gradual collapse here.

Chris Martenson: That’s such at odds with this is going to be the hottest year ever narrative. How do you square that up?

Christian: Well, again, I think they are pointing us in the wrong direction. I think they actually enjoy doing that. It’s a sort of Luciferian inversion of the truth to tell us one thing while they do another, and I don’t know that there’s much else to say about that. I think they’re just throwing us off the track of what’s actually going on here. There was a period, you probably know, in the 70’s where a lot of scientists said, hey, it looks like we’re about to drop off a cliff here into a period of global cooling and we really need to take this into consideration, especially for food production and for how we’re going to keep a lot of our logistics running. And that sort of just dropped off real quick and then switched over now to the global warming narrative, which again, it’s not just that they’re lying to us and pointing us in the wrong direction.

It’s that that allows them the mechanism for control when they can describe — you know, this is straight from The Club of Rome when they can describe CO2 is something that is the enemy of man and it’s something that we all are creating then that is a perfect leaver for them to take control over all aspects of economic activity and institute all of the sorts of things that we’re seeing this year in the lockdown go into hyper drive. You know, all the verbiage and control systems that have been initially rolled out this year in terms of lockdowns are now being extended. They’re just drafting that language right onto the climate situation talking about climate lockdowns because we need to keep our CO2 production down and Sabbath _____ [00:13:08] on Saturdays.

We just shut things down on Sunday as a way to keep carbon production down. It’s pretty stunning to see them just adopt the same control measures that they’ve sort of rolled out the prototypes for in this year under the guidance of the pandemic onto the whole longstanding climate agenda now. So that’s how I would explain what’s going on there.

Chris Martenson: Yeah. I have a whole model myself about what the great reset is all about, but I want to explore your model for it. And so before we move on, though — just to be clear about this — so, in 1318, you mentioned there’s some records that crops sort of collapsed, but that was in a place. I’m wondering is it an appropriate objection to say, yeah, so it might have been tough in Europe, but it was probably fine in Brazil so now we have a global food production system so who cares. Like, if it sort collapses in Russia one year, we’ve got Ukraine or whatever the story is. From the historical perspective, were those Maunder and Dalton minimums were those associated with global wipeouts or were those more sort of regional even if that region was a whole continent.

Christian: Sure. So the specific events that were taking place could be more regional, but it’s absolutely the case that the loss of stability, as we were determining it before, was a global phenomenon. And I think we’ve seen that actually this year where the US had the glacier that wiped out a ton of our soybean and corn production. China had a series of typhoons that did the same thing with much of their crop-producing area and then right now Chris, and this is an important part that I want to hit today in our conversation as well, is soybeans are taking a hit in Brazil. You know, all eyes are now on South America after those two major crop — these are the number one, two, and three producers of soybeans in the world China, US, and Brazil.

And so after these terrible seasons in 2020 for US and China all eyes of money traders are on Brazil. And they of course have been experiencing a record drought with an unprecedented amounts of lack of rainfall down there. I covered an article a few weeks ago that said farmers at this point are just putting seeds into dust and praying that there will be some precipitation over the next few weeks here that will allow them to _____ [00:15:20] out some resemblance of a crop. Unfortunately, that rain really has not materialized and the outlook at this point is not good for the next few weeks either, and so now we are looking at what is the major breadbasket areas of the world experiencing simultaneous huge-scale losses of crops. And there’s a lot of traders asking what happens if we run out of soybeans, and I think that’s a question that’s worth exploring.

Chris Martenson: And I’ve tracked it for a while, and there is global supply, global stocks, and there’s X number of days in inventory of every major cereal grain and beans and things like that. So is there a chance you’re saying that we could actually run out of soybeans?

Christian: There is and it’s not just me. You know, I make sure to find agriculture experts because I’m not one, and I want to see what they’re saying and it is alarming to say the least to see them using the same sorts of words that I would like — I don’t want to raise alarms here, but the US data is consistently marking down throughout this year as we export hand over fist more than ever before to China. You know, China has already cleaned out Brazil from last year. They’re down to 38 metric million tons of soybeans, and they are hoovering up food from anywhere in the world right now. And the US sadly is just letting that happen. We’re just sending them all of our food, and so actually the USDA in November had a report that said, whoa, we were kind of off here guys. About half of our corn and half of our soybeans aren’t there, and then in the report that they released yesterday, December 10th, they cut those ending stocks and production numbers down even further. So yes, there is absolutely a shortage that’s materializing and of course traders being traders will start to speculate and that will sort of amplify the whole situation.

A lot of people will chime in at this point and say this has happened in the past, although not at this level, but usually what happens is price rationing kicks in meaning the beans get — this is supply and demand, right? So the beans will get expensive and China will stop buying because it ceases to make economic sense. Now, we have to come back to the grand solar minimum factor, and the reality that China knows very well what’s going on and that’s why they are sucking up as much food as they can throughout the world. So I do not expect that price rationing mechanism to work, and not only that the markets they actually — prices fell yesterday even as ending stocks were marking down further, which it’s not functioning. The market is not functioning as it should, which amplifies the reality that price rationing is not going to work at this point. So yeah, I think we’re in a situation where we do need to look at the fact that soybeans are by and large the number one source of protein for animal feeds around the world and that this corresponds exactly with the stated goals of these technocrats and their desire to end animal agriculture.

That’s a direct quote from a number of them, including the CEO of Impossible Foods whose creating lab-grown meat funded by Bill Gates and these are agendas and they are executing rapidly on them and a collapse in soybean stocks will mean that the cost of animal feed rapidly rises until it becomes so cost prohibitive to feed your animals that a lot of producers will be forced to start culling their herds. And that is you can’t just invent more cattle and plant more cattle the next season. This is a lasting damage to the protein and the meat supply of the world right now that we’re about to experience, and we’ve already experienced some of this. Just to name the pandemic shutting down the meat plants earlier in the year, so there’s already been some initial turbulence here, and if and as this soybean shortage materializes and has those impacts on animal feed. It’s a huge blow.

Soybeans are of course used throughout human food as well if you know because you’re trying to keep phytoestrogens away from your kids and keep them healthy. When you walk through the grocery store, it’s merely impossible not to find products that have some form of protein isolate or soy lecithin or some soybean oil, which is also labeled as vegetable oil. So when you walk around the supermarket, it’s really — you know, breads have vegetable oil in them, not like the Artisan or sourdoughs. You’ll still be able to find some of these things, but we’re talking about of course the soymilk. So a lot of people when I made this report on soybean shortage initially they said, finally, we’ll get rid of the soy boys. It’s not that simple. You know, we’re talking bread. We’re talking about meats that ship in oils. There’s a long list of any of those products that have soy in them, and I think we’re at risk. Again, as the price of soybeans rises, it will become really expensive for these manufacturers to get their products to market. Another objection that one might raise at this point is, well, we’ll just find some economic substitute or we’ll go out and get a different oil and put that in the bread.

We’ll use something else. And while I very much hope that this is the case, unfortunately, again Chris, I think we’ve seen in 2020 in the early days of the pandemic when some restaurants and schools shut down we saw how brittle and inflexible our food supply chain is as dairy farmers were forced to dump by the truckload milk down the drain because they couldn’t — again, this is the point. They couldn’t pivot and find some other distribution channel that quickly. So given what we’ve seen this year, I worry that it’s unrealistic to expect that large-scale manufacturing so these big bread bakeries and these kinds of uses of soybean oil will have difficulty to say the least in quickly pivoting to something else. I think that’s unrealistic.

Chris Martenson: Yeah, the quick pivoting Covid taught me a lot, and one of them was about that milk situation. I didn’t understand. So everybody was like, oh my God. People panicked and bought toilet paper and that’s why we ran out. I was like no. What happened was people were staying home so they were taking 40% more dumps at home and that means they need toilet paper at home. And it turns out there’s two parallel but never shall they talk to each other, the distribution and manufacturing supply chains, one for the retail and one for the commercial markets. And it turns out you can’t just sort of divert into the other because there were these giant rolls that go into the airport bathrooms and people weren’t using those so the Charmin got rinsed. And it was simple capacity manufacturing, and the same thing happened in milk.

I learned that there’s all this milk that was supposed to go into these big giant things, you know totes that end up at Starbucks in the lever machines or whatever they’re doing and there were only so many one gallon milk jugs and people were now drinking milk at home. Instead of just on Saturday and Sunday, they were drinking it seven days a week, and it just again collapsed that side of the supply chain. So I learned a lot about supply chains in all of this and discovered that the whole thing time, quality, cost, what you want in business, these are very cost effective systems, but they’re not very resilient. You know, they’re tuned for a specific operating environment. As long as people are going to work Monday to Friday and coming home on Saturday and Sunday it’s tuned for that.

Very efficient cost wise, but it couldn’t manage the change so you’re talking about some larger changes. Like, what happens to the larger supply chain network of the feed stocks going into the animals, the animal supply chain, the soy, all the stuff that if you run out of soybeans I mean I would imagine that would be a fairly substantial supply shock again? There would be some learnings in there I bet.

Christian: Learnings to say the least. You know, I mentioned certainly animal feed is the big one that comes to mind for me and goes directly to their stated goal of ending animal agriculture. But, like I said, the vegetable oil is a big one, the soybean oil that’s used in fried and baked goods, lots of breads, salad dressings, meats like tuna fish that come in oils. Soy lecithin is used not just in chocolate but a lot of breakfast cereals, breakfast bars, soy protein isolate. It means all those protein bars and protein powders aren’t going to be there. Yes, we will get rid of soymilk, which oddly may mean that there’s a good chunk of our population that, like I said, is eating all of this food that is inundated with soy. And there’s a chance that they actually literally go through kind of a mass menopause, a withdrawal from the phytoestrogens they’ve been imbibing on a daily basis.

It’s kind of a weird thing to imagine Antifa getting even more roundup from that. So yeah, it’s throughout the human food system as well, and this is not even speaking to biodiesel and other industrial uses like paints and plastics and cleaners that have some aspects of soybeans in them. What’s left at that point on our shelves is pasta and canned goods and frozen goods, and this is where we have to sort of broaden our scope a little bit because everything I just named is the — you know, we’ve seen reports, due to this second wave of COVID-19, there’s going to be shortages of can goods and shortages of pastas. And then, on the frozen goods front, the World Economic Forum just volunteered the other day that the new super spreader is frozen food packaging. And so this is another case Chris where I worry that, rather than take appropriate steps to ensure the population stays fed, they’re going to further amplify the effects.

They want to collapse even what should have remained on the shelves if soybeans run short. And all of this, of course, would again be to make the case, right? They need that problem, which is the first type of Hegelian dialectic. They need a problem so that they can justify the reaction and the solution. In this case, when we’re talking about taking over the food supply chain and this is a stated goal that Rockefeller has rolled out there. We set the table agenda. The EU called it the new Farm to Fork policy. The UN is running their Food System Summit all about insect proteins and how we need to reform that, fundamentally change the entire food system and what we eat to save the climate in the name of public health, but to actually get people eating bugs they’re going to need poke people. They’re going to need people to see why the way we’ve been doing things can’t work, and so from what I sit these are engineered food shortages that, from their perspective, pave the way for that complete reformatting of the food system.

Chris Martenson: I’m kind of two minds here. So I said I had a framing for the great reset, and I’ve been analyzing it. And, when I strip away the gobbledygook and the transhumant technofantasy stuff, which I don’t agree with at all, I agree with the larger thing, which is, hey, we’re at 7.8 billion. We’re going to go to nine billion. We knew we were kind of screwed up. They didn’t put it in this language. I’m paraphrasing. We didn’t really come up with a plan B, and we don’t have the resources for all these billions of people who basically want to live into middle-class lifestyles. It doesn’t exist. We don’t have the oil. We don’t have the soil. We don’t have the water. We don’t have the cement. We ran out of sand. There were all sorts of like flashing red lights from a Malthusian, but it’s just sort of a limits-based discussion, which says, hey, there’s a limit to this fear we live on and we’re kind of poking up against it. And I get the impetus to say maybe we should have a plan. I’m more of an out front be honest with it. People can handle the truth if you tell them. They take a different approach.

That’s fine, but I understand where they’re going with this and all of that. I don’t agree with how, but I agree with the why behind it, which is sooner or later we’re going to have to face up to this idea that we can’t keep living the lives we’ve been living. Sake of argument, United States still consumes about 25% of the world’s energy, and we’re 6% of the population, but that dynamic is rapidly shifting, and it doesn’t work. There’s just not enough energy for 100% of the world to consume the same amount we do. It doesn’t exist, so the question is what do you do with that, and so a lot of that — that’s my framing for this. It makes that we do need some sort of a response to that.

That’s what I think the great reset really is is the elites kind of looking around and going this was unsustainable, which I agree with, and we’ve got to do something, which I agree with. And then, of course, they’re control freaks so it’s all about making sure that everybody gets a barcode and a chip and has a digital currency, and anyway that’s sort of their view of how this works. I’m not sure I agree, but against all of that — well, let me get your reaction to that because I have a response to what I think people should consider doing giving all that, but what do you think about that framing?

Christian: I agree with a large part of what you said, except that I think you give them a lot of benefits about a lot of doubts when you say that there’s any altruistic motivations behind this at all. I think the control is the bottom line here, and I think that’s evidenced by the simple reality that a rational response to what’s on going on — to the problem, the very real problems that you just enumerated, would not be taking total control of all food into massive indoor insect farms or saying we should all be eating plant-based proteins, which are actually even more unsustainable but even worse for the environment to do tons and tons of soybeans and mono-cropping.

They want us to fail forward into even more tighter control because that I would argue is their goal, and if it were not then we would see more reasonable and potentially successful solutions like diversifying our food supply, decentralizing it, and empowering everyone to be able to go back to victory gardens were the way we used to think about this. Everyone should be growing their own food that way there cannot be a blow to our food system that takes us all out. That’s the way humanity has survived to date, and so I think to think about anything else is just really it’s got to be motivated by the wrong kinds of ideas and that being, as you hinted at, just taking total control of things. And they’re pretty open about that being the motivation when they talk about the new supply chain being a block chain, an artificial intelligence driven system that will identify uniquely every last coffee bean harvested and every piece of a fish pulled from the sea so that we can track it across the entire planet.

They’re implementing system. IBM is rolling out that system right now because of the COVID-19 scare. And they’re putting in these surveillance systems that Klaus Schwabe himself writes in this book that COVID-19 is not as huge as a thing as everyone might think it is. But the reality is that these surveillance systems will not go away after it. These are lasting changes that they’re engineering to humanity right now, and they’ve put satellites in the sky. It’s another way that the agenda has been grafted on the climate. It’s not contact tracing now. It’s climate tracing, and we actually saw Al Gore himself come out with a climate tracing initiative whereby a network of existing satellites is now being myriad into this new artificial intelligence system th