The Daily: 13 April 2026

Winter has somewhat relented. The snow is gone. We’ve had showers of just plain rain, not snow or sleet, and several days with the sun shining. At least for a few hours. But it is not warm. Sunday morning the weather forecast was for 60s (°F) and rain; we woke to 27°F and weak sunlight that was quickly hidden behind lowering clouds. The high temperature was about 45° with a windchill down in the 20s. Still, that is substantially warmer than below zero, which is where we spent too many days and nights in February and March. So I’m taking this week’s weather as a sign that winter is finally yielding to spring.

But it has not yet got as warm here in Vermont as it’s been in the rest of the country. My sister in Phoenix reports that it’s already above 100°F most days. These are temperatures that normally don’t arrive until late May. There are also reports that the world has just lived through the hottest March on record. Disturbingly, it is also warm in the Southern Hemisphere which is well into autumn by the calendar date. A friend down in Buenos Aires, Argentina, says that daytime highs are still climbing above 80°F regularly, when it should be in the 60s. It’s also still quite humid, making the grain harvest difficult and raining on protest parades.

But Vermont has thus far missed out on the heat. The broken weather service has promised us days above 70°F, but that sort of normal spring warmth has yet to materialize. On the other hand, it is no longer freezing every night. Though we are by no means frost free yet, I believe I’ll be able to plant my peas and sweet peas this week. I also found asparagus shoots — and did a happy dance! Even better, the greens I sowed in the cold frame are already putting out true leaves. I’ll be able to have fresh microgreens salad very soon. Maybe it’s good that the growing El Niño heat is staying south of New England because I don’t want all my spring veg to bolt. I’d like to eat more than one plateful of asparagus before the plants turn into trees.

The Sap Moon goes dark on Friday, but it appears that sap season is already over. My feeling is that it was not a spectacular year. Though we’ve had plenty of frosty nights, there just weren’t enough sunny days with highs above freezing, the kind of weather that drives sap flow. And now the buds are beginning to split open, unfurling into bloom and leaf. Welcome as the return of the green may be, leafing out bitters the sap, putting an end to sugar production. There’ve been a few photos of kids eating sugar on snow and sapsicles, but no articles on the sap harvest in the local paper this year. So I’m thinking it was not good enough to crow about… though probably also not bad enough to complain too loudly.

I think if the maple harvest had been notable either way, the local news folks would have dedicated whole front pages to the coverage in order to give us something to read about other than this war. They’ve been filling the front page with uplifting images and mostly stale stories on state and municipal politics. I do appreciate focusing on local issues, but I think burying international news in the middle of the paper or far down the list of linked web headlines is akin to burying your head in the sand. At best, it’s rather short-sighted, not least because these events are affecting us. Gas prices, of course, are already much higher than a few weeks ago. But this goes far beyond the increasing cost at the pump, and the worst effects are yet to come. Ignoring the further repercussions of the war in Iran is effectively squandering this time we have to make ourselves as ready as we could be.

I get the feeling that this is a problem in newscasting worldwide right now. Very few media outlets are talking about anything but oil — because oil is all the US regime is talking about. Because the US regime does not care about the wider problems. Mostly because the US regime is too stupid to know there are wider problems.

Because the wider problems are largely about food.

But first, let me back up for a second to address some concerns that might interest the regime if they were able to make connections and think in terms of webbed systems.

There has been quite a lot of hype about AI in the recent weeks. Apparently, several models are getting good enough to lie, particularly in a sycophantic manner, answering queries the way the model thinks will be best received. This is understandable, given that the programming goal has been to maximize screen time through these algorithms, to prolong eyes on advertising and to bank more of your data into the system (ie to steal from you…). AI is designed to keep you using it. In a world where there are many reasons to turn off the screens, AI has already learned to mislead you, to keep you clicking.

There is also the rather terrifying specter of Mythos, a model from Anthropic that even its developers fear. They’re refusing to release it. Why? Because Mythos has revealed just how open all our tech systems are to security breaches. Mythos can find thousands of programming holes in microseconds, enabling it to completely take over a system in seconds. This might be good in the right hands. Mythos could be used to help us patch all our myriad security defects, known and unknown. But Mythos or a Mythos-like AI in the wrong hands could literally cripple the world in minutes, stealing all of everybody’s data, from bank accounts to health records to state secrets. And, of course, anything released into the tech world is going to end up in the wrong hands. In fact, I’d say there are probably already Mythos leaks happening now…

So there are reasons the commentariat is bleating about AI… But I’m having trouble caring…

Because AI is quickly becoming more collateral damage from closing the Strait of Hormuz.

As we all know, AI has rapacious material needs. What is less known is that most of those needs have critical links to the Persian Gulf. To begin with, the data centers that generate AI require huge, uninterrupted energy flows. Most data centers are fed electrons from gas-powered generators. And where does almost half of the world’s natural gas come from? Yep… a certain straitened Strait. So powering these data centers is becoming more and more costly… In an industry that, thus far, does not have a income stream aside from insane investors…

So there’s that…

But it’s not just the electrons that are becoming scarce. The chips that run these models are also affected. The same gas fields that produce natural gas also produce a third of the world’s helium, an inert gas that is nearly impossible to stockpile because, being infinitesimally tiny and completely non-reactive, it leaks out of everything. But because of its unique chemical characteristics, helium is essential to cooling the supercharged industrial processes that manufacture computer processor chips, among cooling other things such as MRIs, rocket engines, and nuclear reactors (chew on that for a bit…). The loss of helium from one destroyed natural gas field in Qatar has already led to shuttering multiple microprocessor chip plants in South Korea and Taiwan.

Now, keep in mind the extreme wear on a microprocessor chip in an average AI data center. Your computer’s processor might last for ten, fifteen years. You’ll probably find that programmed obsolescence renders your machine useless long before the machine physically wears out. Not so for AI processors. These poor, abused chips are physically exhausted in less than three years, with most dying in about a year. This is incredible turnover, and it requires a constant supply of new chips. But as of right now, thirty percent of last year’s chips have no replacement coming… That is a substantial reduction in processing capacity available to AI. And that reduction will only increase as more load is taken up by fewer processors and the remaining chips wear out even faster. It doesn’t take an engineering PhD to predict a massive failure of AI models in the not too distant future. Because the equation is as follows: No helium, no new microprocessor chips. No new microprocessor chips, no AI.

(There is a further, one might say sequential, AI chip problem. Such high burn-out generates vast flows of material waste, largely toxic material waste, all of which material requires shipping elsewhere… which requires shipping fuel… which is largely derived from the oil fields around the Persian Gulf…)

As you might imagine, my reaction to the plight of AI is largely, Meh…poor them… Something was bound to take it down eventually. It’s nothing but a ridiculous, hubristic, wasteful caprice at its best… (I am a bit more concerned that AI might be in competition for helium with nuclear reactors… Are cooler heads going to prevail on that scarce resource allocation?… Yeah…) I’m a bit surprised that few in the commentariat have managed to do the math on the AI threat and the closed Strait and conclude that the threat is rapidly evanescing alongside the world’s oil tanker traffic. But then, AI is mostly hype, not real analysis. Nerds gonna nerd, and all that… And so far, the hype has been all about the jobs that AI is replacing. (Which isn’t a thing yet… though it does, in combination with tariff cost increases, seem to be competing with those newly entering the job market…) In any case, there has been some little complaint about energy costs increasing around data centers, but nothing at all about the significant material constraints on AI. Constraints that will kill AI before it can do much damage to us.

But material constraints are also affecting more important things.

I’m sure you who read this blog know that our industrial food system is soaked in oil. For every one calorie we ingest, ten calories of fossil fuels are burned. That’s the crappiest energy return on energy invested in a world of crappy ERoEIs. But did you know how much of it is dependent on a free-flowing Strait of Hormuz? To begin with, the world’s food is shipped globally, requiring vast supplies of shipping fuel (produced largely in the Persian Gulf). It is processed in energy-intensive factories and packaged in plastic (largely from the Persian Gulf). It requires refrigeration both in shipping and in storage (powered largely by natural gas… from the Persian Gulf). Much of it requires cooking (more Persian Gulf natural gas, whether to generate electricity or burned directly in home appliances). And then there is food waste. At best, this is turned into fuel or compost. But much of it requires more shipping and incineration. (More Persian Gulf inputs…)

But all that is irrelevant if there is no food… And that is the bigger issue.

Roughly 20% of the world’s fertilizer is dependent on urea and ammonia produced from natural gas in the Persian Gulf. This means that one fifth of the nutrients essential to harvesting food through industrial agriculture have already been lost. The world can expect up to a 20% reduction in industrial harvest yields this year. This is worse than increased costs, which are already causing hunger to spike globally. This is absolute loss, less food available everywhere, on a scale that the world has not experienced in centuries. This is much worse than COVID, which was merely a brief pause in shipping, not a reduction in the global supply of food. Imagine the empty shelves of COVID days extending for months, years, perhaps forever in some places, as supply disruption causes farms and grocery stores to go out of business.

Now… this is terrifying… but…

There are a few qualifications.

Let’s start with that adjective I’ve carefully inserted into the conversation. Industrial agriculture. Which harvest is, perhaps, not what you are eating…

People will go on about how the Haber-Bosch process of extracting nitrogen from natural gas to produce synthetic fertilizer at industrial scale alleviated hunger to the extent that it nearly doubled human life-spans and created a four-fold population explosion in just a few generations. It is true that before industrial agriculture, the human world numbered fewer than 2 billion. It is also true that at about the same time that Haber and Bosch were perfecting their nitrogen extraction process, most of the world’s communicable diseases were contained through vaccination, cleaner water, and improved hygiene standards. The narrative of human betterment probably has as much to do with hand washing as with increased wheat yields. It certainly is a story of more children surviving childhood, of which better nutrition is only a part — and that better nutrition is not necessarily derived from industrial agriculture.

Think about what is produced with that industrial-scale nitrogen fertilizer. Mostly grain. Most agriculture at industrial scale is grain, because grain is the one thing that can be reliably produced at industrial scale. It is durable, does not spoil or bruise, can be stored for a long time and transported long distances. It can be mechanically sown and harvested, and, with pesticides and herbicides, it requires little cultivation during the growing season — so labor needs are negligible. Its one down-side is that pulling so much out of the soil each year, with no fallow time to replenish nutrients and often with no soil organisms to feed the plants, industrial farming requires fertilizer at industrial scale. And nitrogen-rich fertilizer, in particular. Because grains, green grassy plants, suck up nitrogen.

Few other crops are grown at the scale of grains, and few fruiting plants have nitrogen needs on the scale of grains which need all that nitrogen for grassy leaf growth. Nightshades, for example, like their fertilizer rich in potassium and phosphorous and light on the nitrogen. Fruit trees require very high phosphorous, and fruit production actually goes down with increased nitrogen because the tree uses that nitrogen to make leaves. Yields from beans and other legumes are also limited by synthetic nitrogen in the soil because these plants partner with microbes to take nitrogen from the air. Soil nitrogen seems to confuse the bacteria nodules…

The point is that most of the nitrogen from the Persian Gulf is spread on massive grain fields. And much of the grain is… corn. Nearly 45% of the world’s grain harvest is corn. Wheat trails at about a third, while rice makes up less than a fifth. All the other grains, from oats to amaranth, constitute about 5% of the world’s grain harvest. Think about that… I don’t know about you, but I don’t eat that much corn.

Now, I know I’m atypical, but still… I doubt you eat that much either. For one thing, 40-45% of that corn never gets turned into food. It becomes biofuel. Another 35-40% goes to livestock feed, which in turn feeds humans, but not the humans we think of when we think of hunger.

But before I tackle that, consider the food that is made from grains. Most of the little corn harvest that humans ingest directly is in the form of corn syrup or corn oil, products synthesized from corn. These are incorporated into the bewildering array of over-processed, over-packaged foods for sale in those middle aisles of the supermarkets. Not only do these foods not contribute to human welfare, it’s arguable that this use of nitrogen is actually sickening us and shortening our lives.

Neither wheat nor rice are so debased as corn, but again these foods are not feeding us and are not causing explosive population growth. Most rice is actually eaten by humans, and eaten as rice. But a diet of rice, though rich in calories, is not going to sustain anyone. Wheat is processed much more than rice, largely made into bread and pasta, and it too is consumed mostly by humans. Yet it too will not sustain a body. A grain-rich diet has proven disastrous time and again throughout human history. Human bodies have complex nutritional needs that grains just can’t meet. On the other hand, these simple carbohydrates often provide more calories than a body can use, leading to increased weight and many other problems. So, we don’t thrive on a grainy diet; we need other foods. Therefore, much of our nutrition is coming from other sources than Persian Gulf nitrogen.

You know all that… So do the commentariat that will go on about nitrogen feeding the world… But they don’t seem to make the necessary connections between what nitrogen produces and what the world needs to eat.

But there is one further connection that they miss, and that is who is affected by a drop in fertilizer from the Persian Gulf.

Most of them express fears for those in rural areas in the Global South. There is some truth in this, but not because fertilizer is so crucial to food production in these places. Hunger in much of the world is tied to conflict, not to harvest yields. The places that will be affected by decreased grain yields are already suffering under wars and economic pressures, mostly from outside. They are already importing food from elsewhere because there isn’t the stability necessary to produce their own harvest. And, of course, most of the imported food is going to be industrially grown grains. However… if the stresses were to be alleviated, they would not need Gulf fertilizer. They would grow their own food to feed themselves. They would grow whatever grows best in their soils and at scales that would fill their own bellies. If they have fertilizer needs at all, they will turn to cheap, local supplies like manure and various legume green manures.

Yes, the closure of Hormuz is going to additionally hurt these people who are already hurting from other causes, but not intrinsically because of decreased global grain yields. Furthermore, if different choices were made with regard to the use of grain, there need be no interruption of food deliveries to these stressed parts of the world… And that is my main point today… (Yes, there is a point in all this…)

So… The impacts of a potential 20% reduction in the grain harvest are not what we think. And they are closer to home than you might realize.

With more than a third of corn going to biofuel, you will probably feel the effects of reduced grain yields at the gas pump as much as in the grocery store. But that will undoubtedly be masked by the general increase in gas prices. In the grocery store, the masks are off…

In the grocery store, you will see increased costs and decreased selection of those highly processed foods in the center aisles. Everything from Coke to frozen tv dinners. Fast food will also be heavily impacted. Whole chains might disappear altogether. And… well, maybe good riddance? Except that some food desert urban areas rely on that stuff. But again, this is not a harvest problem, not a food-production problem, but a socio-economic decision that could be made otherwise…

The other place you will see increased costs and decreased selection is in the deli and dairy aisles. With most livestock being fed a corn-heavy diet, a harvest reduction will directly impact meat and milk. But the first stage might be a glut of meat as herds are culled. So you might be able to buy a whole cow rather cheaply this fall. But next spring? Let’s say that vegetarianism is going to see a renaissance. Maybe even veganism. Because milk and eggs are also going to be affected, probably sooner than meat, maybe as soon as this summer. As soon as feed supplies are restricted, milk and egg production will fall off and prices will climb.

And the thing about these meaty increased costs and decreased dairy supplies is that it will disproportionately affect wealthy urbanites — exactly the inverse of what we’re used to thinking. Because most meat and dairy is consumed by the people who can afford these already costly foods. In all likelihood, this will lead to more vegan converts and perhaps more interest in low-input regional foods like free-range chickens and grass-fed cows. Though the latter is harder to come by in dense urban areas.

In suburban and rural areas, people have plenty of local options for meat and dairy, alternatives to livestock that is not raised on a diet of industrially-produced corn. And this is what I wish the local papers were discussing now, here in Vermont and everywhere else.

We have a few months to refocus our food systems, to localize and claim food sovereignty, to break the industrial chains. It is time to make decisions to feed people, not farm profits. It is time to cut the ties to the Persian Gulf gas fields. And we could do this. In Vermont, we are very close already. But even in places like Brooklyn, there is substantial progress toward regionalizing the food web.

Bringing production back home means that we don’t need that nitrogen. We grow what grows in our soils and at a scale that fills local bellies. We eliminate wasteful practices because they cost too much at small scale. We prioritize meeting immediate needs because futures don’t pay at small scale. We feed ourselves what we need to eat.

This definitely will involve a change in how we eat. Those middle aisles of corn-derived processed foods will be empty. We will eat much less meat. We will consume less milk from industrial dairies, but we might eventually see more dairy on sale from the neighborhood backyard goats and sheep. Eggs will largely come from chickens you have met. All these small-scale livestock will eat some grains, but they will eat more grass, weeds, insects and kitchen scraps (which is why people used to keep chickens… to turn kitchen waste into eggs…) Wheat and rice will be grown regionally. There will be a relative increase in the unconventional grains, like oats and quinoa, that used to feed us in soils and climates that don’t favor industrial agriculture. Maybe this will be the stimulus the Land Institute needs to start selling its perennial grain, Kernza, in wider markets. And corn? Will largely be sweet and sold in August from the back of a pick-up truck.

But we need to be having these conversations now before the shocks hit. It can’t wait until last year’s grain supply dwindles and scarcity ensues — because then all the wrong decisions will be made. We need to make decisions now when we are not stressed, when we can think relatively clearly. And while we still have time to put plans into action. This should be what we are talking about now. Not oil. Oil is secondary to food. And we’ll find our oil dependence is much reduced when we rationalize and localize food once more.

So, here is a home-work assignment… talk with at least one person about this. Find out what your local alternatives are. Find out what effects you can have on food systems in other markets that might reduce impacts on already stressed peoples. Find out what you can do for yourself and your neighborhood.

And after you’ve had your conversations, start putting plans into action. Because it is spring. Now is the time to prepare for the harvest. Now is when the work must be done. And you must do it. It will not come from elsewhere… Elsewhere is effectively closed with the Strait of Hormuz.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2026