On the Bookshelf: In ‘The Coming Food Crisis,’ Farmer John Klar Wants Us to Respect the Origin of Food
By Louis Conte, Health Freedom Editor, The MAHA Report
“With one mind, we turn to honor and thank all the Food Plants we harvest from the garden. Since the beginning of time, the grains, vegetables, beans, and berries have helped the people survive. Many other living things draw strength from them too. We gather all the Plant Foods together as one and send them a greeting of thanks.”
– An ancient prayer of Thanksgiving from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people.
John Klar’s cautionary epic, “The Coming Food Crisis: How Corporations, Activists, and Climate Alarmists Are Waging War on Farmers,” serves notice that America must reconsider the way we produce food and the people who produce it.
“I wrote this book to educate and warn people that we must think hard about our food,” Klar says. “I didn’t write it to scare people, but our farmers are in crisis. And we need to act to change direction.”
Klar is correct. Over the past five years, America has lost over 140,000 farms - 47 farms a day.
Klar, who has a small farm in Vermont, points out that our food supply depends on volatile economic factors, supply chains that might break and corporations that put profits before health. In his book, he addresses the inherent dangers of factory farming, chemical fertilizers and the use of glyphosate and other insecticides. He cautions that we are depleting soil at alarming rates. “Our soil is alive. It is not dead dirt,” Klar says.
Klar pulls no punches and calls out the cabal of corporate actors who are seeking to control food production in an effort to control humanity. He introduces the reader to the notion that personal liberty involves one’s ability to have personal control of where one’s food comes from. “That’s what the whole bug burger thing is about,” he says. “It is a way the globalists have to signal who is in control.” While this is a serious book, Klar does have a sense of humor. “I was going to call it “On Bug Burgers and Cow Farts” but someone at Skyhorse thought better of that idea,” he says.
Meat tainted with growth hormones and antibiotics wrapped in plastic. Food harvested by machines on mega farms run by nameless corporations. Food grown with artificial fertilizers comes in a box with four hundred chemical additives, some of which are labeled as being ‘natural’ ingredients.
Isn’t all food supposed to be natural? For Klar, it is natural and personal.
Our conversation took place after Klar had had dinner and he noted that he’d enjoyed a meatloaf that came from a cow that he had raised. “My cow had a name. I have a connection to my animals and I respect them. This was not a meal that came to me wrapped in plastic,” he says. “I came to farming in 1999 due to my own health issues. Farming helped me get healthy.”
Klar decries the loss of small family farms. He points out that America is losing its agricultural history. “People should talk to farmers,” he says. “They have all sorts of wisdom about things most people never think about. We can’t lose that wisdom.”
This is the disconnection that Klar is addressing. It is more important than we realize. People connected to the earth and the world around them understand this.
Klar offers the reader a solution to our coming food crisis. The solution, he says, is for Americans to remember that who we are is who we once were – family farmers. Instead of relying on food that must be trucked or flown into our supermarkets, Klar proposes that we reinvigorate small, locally owned, locally controlled farms. “If civilization collapses tomorrow, indigenous people who live off the land will be fine. Farmers will know how to survive. We should think about that.”
Klar writes: “May the food system they inherit be healthier and more secure than the present travesty, and may small rural family farms reclaim the American countryside.”
Ultimately, Klar has warned us to wake up but also empowered us with hope. “The book is not just for farmers. It is for everyone,” he says.
“We gather our minds together to send greetings and thanks to all the animal life in the world. They have many things to teach us as people. We are honored by them when they give up their lives so we may use their bodies as food for our people. We see them near our homes and in the deep forests. We are glad t]ar still here and we hope that it will always be so.”
— An ancient Haudenosaunee prayer of Thanksgiving for animals.
“The Coming Food Crisis: How Corporations, Activists, and Climate Alarmists Are Waging War on Farmers,” by John Klar, with an introduction by Joel Salatin, is a new release from MAHA Books, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing (March 17, 2026).
I personally will never understand why farmers are not the highest paid people on the planet. Instead, we "value" entertainment above basic needs.
I always like to chat with the cashiers at the grocery store and upon buying liver, which she thought was gross, was actually stunned to find out where hamburger came from! Truth. I thought she was kidding, but in fact she is the product of our education system. I will admit leaving there feeling that this country is in big trouble if we have naive people, maybe no fault of her own, as the next generation of thinkers and leaders who actually prefer the artificial, in many aspects, to the real. Just my thoughts.
Love the message, not sure about the presentation. I have been told by a friend who grew up in Illinois that I, a native of NYC, have a romantic notion of farming. She used to work for the Dept. of Agriculture, in DC, doling out loans and grants, while a cousin wrung corn and soybeans for her on the family farm in the Midwest; she approaches farming as people in NYC approach fashion, not as a high calling but as a way to make money, as much as possible, as quickly and easiily as possible. So I'm not impressed by Iroquois prayers to corn gods anymore; if the main God isn't going to help feed the people, I'm not betting on subsidiaries. This Wordsworthian approach to agriculture strikes me, however, as a balanced reaction to the alternative, which is to view those who put food in our mouths as ignorant peasants, the lowest level of society, subject to the worst abuse from their "betters" (read any decent English novel before Thomas Hardy). The modern equivalent, in the USA, is the scorn that, among a certain group of women now, approaches hatred of the rural, of John Deere caps, pickup trucks, the smell of manure, country music, and, most of all, the "uneducated" MAGA people enjoying these things. Can't we take emotion out of these discussions entirely and simply present facts? The agricultural industry will soon be as concentrated as the automobile industry was and we see the results of that, our land will be owned by foreigners, the technology that has given us general obesity, ubiquitous auto-immunity diseases and cancer spikes will be ramped up to drag more calories from the soil, and we Americans will have lost yet more control over our destiny. The real lesson we should learn from the Iroquois is: When foreigners come for your land, beat the crap out of them.