According to reports, western Kansas is a wasteland of parched, dead fields. Wheat crops have been decimated, which means the American food supply will suffer yet another major blow.

"There's nothing out there," says Vance Ehmke, a wheat farmer from Lane County. "It's dead. It's just ankle-high straw."

Ehmke's farm is one of many that, after being planted several months ago, now looks like a dust bowl. Rows of brown, shriveled plants nest in hardened dirt that is now scarred with deep cracks due to a lack of water combined with the relentless beating sun.

If there was ever a year for this not to be happening, this is the year. Global wheat supplies are already being strangled by numerous factors, including the war in Ukraine. And now a major wheat production region of the United States is facing near-total desolation.