The War on Farmers: John Klar's Central Argument in "The Coming Food Crisis," By Bob Farmer (Dairy Farmer)
John Klar's latest book, The Coming Food Crisis: How Corporations, Activists, and Climate Alarmists Are Waging War on Farmers (released March 17, 2026, by Skyhorse Publishing), delivers a stark, urgent warning: America's, and the world's, food system is under deliberate, multi-front assault. What appears as abundant supermarket shelves conceals a growing fragility engineered by powerful interests. The shelves won't stay full forever, and when they empty, the consequences will be famine in an age of supposed plenty.
At its core, Klar's argument is that independent family farmers, especially livestock producers, are being systematically targeted and eliminated, not by accident, but by coordinated forces pursuing profit, control, and ideological agendas. Three main culprits drive this war:
1.Multinational corporations consolidate food production through industrialisation, vertical integration, and global supply chains. They replace diverse small farms with massive monoculture operations and imported commodities, making the system more profitable for them but brittle for everyone else. Farm families vanish yearly, replaced by corporate giants. Economic policies fuel inflation, soaring input costs (fertilizer, feed, fuel), and supply-chain vulnerabilities that benefit Big Ag while squeezing out locals.
2.Animal rights activists and extremists push radical anti-livestock campaigns that portray traditional farming as cruel or environmentally destructive. These efforts criminalise practices essential to regenerative, pasture-based agriculture, driving up compliance costs and forcing closures.
3.Climate alarmists weaponise "climate change" narratives to impose restrictive regulations on emissions, land use, and animal agriculture. Klar sees this as the latest propaganda tool to justify heavy-handed policies that mirror EU farmer revolts, where mandates on nitrogen fertilizers, herd reductions, and "green" transitions have sparked massive protests. In the U.S., similar elitist schemes threaten to criminalise independent peasants under environmental pretexts, all while ignoring real pollutants (like chemical runoff from industrial renewables) in favour of carbon-focused hysteria.
Together, these forces create a perfect storm: dependency on processed, imported, ultra-processed foods rises; food sovereignty erodes; and human liberties shrink as governments and NGOs enforce top-down control. The result is engineered fragility — supermarkets look plentiful, but the underlying system grows ever more centralised, vulnerable to disruption, and hostile to small-scale, resilient producers.
Klar builds directly on his earlier work, Small Farm Republic: Why Conservatives Must Embrace Local Agriculture, Reject Climate Alarmism, and Lead an Environmental Revival. That book advocated regenerative agriculture as a conservative, pro-freedom path to healthier soils, stronger rural economies, better food, and environmental gains without Big Government overreach. The Coming Food Crisis extends the diagnosis: the threats have intensified, globalist consolidation accelerates, and political awakenings (like RFK Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" alliance with Trump) offer hope but require urgent action.
The book's proposed path forward is straightforward and grassroots: reject dependency on corporate-processed junk and imported fragility; know your farmer; buy direct from local producers; eat real, whole food. Regenerative practices can restore soils, boost small-farm viability, and rebuild food security from the bottom up. But it demands awareness and decision, readers must choose sides. As Joel Salatin notes in the foreword, the book is a "rallying cry" and "wake-up call": get informed, then act decisively to support security, stability, and safety in food, farms, and families, or risk becoming part of the problem.
Klar doesn't mince words: this isn't mere policy debate; it's a battle for food sovereignty against those who would eliminate independent farmers and make populations reliant on fragile, controlled systems. The crisis isn't hypothetical — it's unfolding now through farm bankruptcies, EU-style crackdowns, and rising prices. If the West don't stand up for their farms and freedom to choose what they eat, the shelves will one day go bare, and the architects of this war will have won.
In Klar's view, the solution lies not in more centralised power but in decentralised resilience: empowered small farmers, informed consumers, and a rejection of the false promises of industrial "efficiency" and climate dogma. Buy local, farm regeneratively, defend liberty — or prepare for the famine that follows the illusion of plenty.
