The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week gave a U.K.-based biotech company the green light to produce gene-edited pigs for human consumption in the U.S.
PIC, formerly the Pig Improvement Company, uses CRISPR gene-editing technology to genetically engineer pigs to be resistant to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS), a viral infection that affects pigs produced in industrial factory farms, according to Technology Review.
PRRS, which first emerged in the 1980s, is a contagious respiratory virus that causes fever, respiratory issues and reproductive failure in pigs. It can also suppress the immune system, making pigs more vulnerable to other infections.
A recent analysis showed the virus cost the industrial pork industry about $1.2 billion in lost production between 2016 and 2020. Producers have had difficulty controlling the virus because it mutates quickly, rendering vaccines ineffective.
CRISPR gene editing makes it possible for scientists to manipulate an animal’s own DNA, rather than adding DNA from other species to it, as has been done with previous genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
The FDA’s approval allows the company to produce the pigs commercially, which includes allowing the pigs to reproduce and pass on their genetic modification.
The designers of the pig used the CRISPR gene-editing “scissors” to edit pig embryos, cutting out the molecular receptor the PRRS virus uses to enter the cells. They then implanted the embryos into young female pigs.
“This approval is a milestone in biotechnology, with gene-edited animals potentially offering a more sustainable and disease-resistant source of protein,” wrote Food & Drink International.
Supporters also tout the idea that gene-edited pigs will need fewer antibiotics, because they won’t get sick.
However, critics doubt the editing will work for long. They also raised concerns about the technology’s unintended effects.
GMWatch, a GMO watchdog group that reported the FDA approval in its newsletter, wrote:
“We don’t expect the genetically engineered virus resistance — which even now is leaky — to last long in the gene-edited pigs. We saw in the COVID pandemic just how quickly viruses mutate to evade any barrier placed in their path.
“The genetically altered pigs will drive the evolution of mutations in the virus that enable it to break through the engineered virus resistance — potentially leading to the emergence of even more virulent strains of the virus.”
Swine disease researchers have also raised doubts about whether the gene editing will even work. A retired University of Minnesota professor and veterinarian told AVMA News, “There is no silver bullet when it comes to PRRS.”
“It will hopefully improve the control of PRRS,” he said. “But as it has not been tested under conditions representative of large-scale pork production, producers and veterinarians will still need to apply all the control measures that have been proven to be effective against this virus.”
In response to the news, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) is calling on the FDA to implement stricter regulations on genetically engineered animals. The organization said the current regulatory structure “lacks the necessary rigor and public transparency.”
CFS also said that gene-editing animals can lead to unanticipated animal health issues, environmental disruption, and that without labeling laws, it can take away consumers’ rights to make informed decisions about what they eat.
Other attempts at gene-editing animals … and people
The FDA decision on PIC’s pigs is among the first for gene-edited livestock in the U.S. The process has long raised concerns, because in animals, gene editing has led to unexpected side effects, including enlarged tongues and extra vertebrae.
Often, researchers don’t know the extent of a gene’s functions until they attempt to make changes to it, Dr. Joseph Mercola reported.
Technology Review said the pig-editing project is “scientifically similar” to an attempt in China in 2018 to genetically engineer humans. Scientist He Jiankui edited the embryos of what would become twin girls to make them resistant to HIV by removing a receptor gene.
When the news broke about the twins, there was international outcry. Jankui was sentenced to three years in prison and a hefty financial penalty. It is unclear what happened to the girls. Jiankui told NPR they are “living a normal, peaceful, nondisturbed life,” but declined to comment on whether there had been any negative effects.
An international panel decided no one should modify babies again “until it has been clearly established that it is possible to efficiently and reliably make precise genomic changes without undesired changes in human embryos.”
However, those restrictions don’t apply to pigs.
Raymond Rowland, a University of Illinois researcher involved in creating the first PRRS-proof animals, told Technology Review that gene editing is “in its largest sense, a way to create more perfect life.”
So far, only a few gene-edited animals have been allowed in the U.S. In 2015, the FDA approved AquaBounty Technologies’ application to create and farm its genetically engineered salmon, designed to grow twice as fast as normal salmon.
However, after approval, the company faced opposition from environmental activists and low demand for its product. Last December, it closed its fish factory and culled the remaining stock.
In 2022, the FDA gave gene-edited cattle, developed by bioengineering company Recombinetics, a low-risk determination for marketing products, including meat. The animals have their genes modified to make their coats shorter and slicker, which is intended to help them better withstand heat stress, allowing them to gain more weight and increase the efficiency of meat production.
The FDA said there were no safety concerns and allowed the development to move forward. The low-risk determination means that when the company is ready to market the gene-edited cattle, it will face lower hurdles in the regulatory process.
The same company was attempting to gene-edit cattle in Brazil to be hornless, but found unexpected genomic alterations during the process, which Brazil subsequently halted.
Not the first gene-edited pigs in U.S.
PIC’s pigs are the second genetically modified pigs approved as food in the U.S. In 2020, Revivicor won FDA approval for its GalSafe pigs, edited to be safe for people with the alpha-gal syndrome to eat.
Alpha-gal syndrome sensitizes people to allergic reactions to beef, pork and lamb, usually after a tick bite. The GMO animal was created by removing the gene for alpha-1, 3-galactosyltransferase, which “attaches alpha-galactose sugars to cell surfaces,” Medpage Today reported.
While the GalSafe pigs were for a specialty market, PIC hopes its pigs will be widely adopted across the livestock industry. The company is seeking approval in Canada, Mexico and China and plans to launch sales in the U.S. next year, Food & Drink International reported.
More gene-edited animals are also in the works. Last year, the FDA announced the establishment of two Animal and Veterinary Innovation Centers focused on making genetic alterations to animals that “support agricultural resilience, food security, animal health, or public health.”
The agency provided funding to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to develop gene-edited chickens to resist highly pathogenic avian influenza, also known as bird flu. It also funded the University of California, Davis, to work on various major livestock species for food and to share their data to help ease the regulation process.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
