Your 2027 Grocery Bill Was Signed on June 29
The war, the tariffs, and the proclamation that set next year’s food prices, and the people who pay first.
A note from Lawrence
It opens in a combine cab outside Holdrege, Nebraska, in October. A fifty-eight-year-old farmer is bringing in a crop that is mostly not there, with an empty seat beside him where the man who rode that cab for nine years sat until he was taken in a July raid. Fertilizer he couldn’t afford, the most expensive diesel of his life, a drought, a steer sold early because hay cost more than the animal.
He could have survived any one of them. A farm isn’t built to take all of them at once. Then I follow the bill back to its source: a war that sealed the Strait of Hormuz, tariffs on every input a farm needs, and a June 29 proclamation that quietly admitted the emergency. You’ll be told nobody did this. It was one man, and the bill lands on the people with the least room, then on your grocery receipt.
