Shelves are emptying and now prices are about to jump again. This is the moment your crazy prepper friends tried to warn you about. This is your last chance to prepare for the worst.
Guns and ammo: doesn't have to be fancy. Get something you are comfortable hunting and defending yourself with.
Food: canned goods. Anything that has a shelf life longer than 6 months. Hopefully this won't last longer than a few weeks, but hope is not a game plan. Anticipating the worst is.
Warm clothing and blankets: remember the Texas deep freeze? Plan for that times 10 if you want to make it.
That's all basic stuff you can and should get right now... God bless and protect, Frens... We'll make it.
I don't think anyone here is in any danger of losing their senses or panic buying.
I buy all the time from local farmers because luckily I live in a rural area. I posted a link here a while ago to a local farm where i buy meat. But most of the local farm stands and sellers at farmers' markets are selling a lot of stuff bought from the same factory farms the grocery stores are buying from. I found one here that sells mostly their own products, even they are selling tomatoes now from Florida. One other local farm sells only their own stuff but you can only buy whatever is in season at that moment with long gaps of nothing.
I even considered investing in a CSA but the closest one to me is about 100 miles round trip per week. If you can find one that delivers anywhere close to you, that's a great way to support a local farm. You'll only get vegetables, fruits, eggs and maybe meats in season and they shut down in winter.
If the food supply shuts down, I don't think local farms are necessarily going to be more reliable.
My mother was raised on a farm where Grandpa did all of the heavy work and plowing with his mules. He never owned any farm machinery, or even a car until after my mother was grown. They had no electricity and no running water indoors. They cured their own hams from their own hogs. The one thing Mama hated was hog slaughtering day.
Daddy was a town kid but his parents were country folks raised on farms too. The farm where that Granddaddy was raised has been in the family since the 1750s. Point of all this is we were raised gardening, canning, making things by hand.
We always had a big garden and canned everything, Mom made jars and jars of apple butter in a big old cauldron outside over a fire and stirred with a giant wooden stirring thing. I am a gardening nut, but had no garden this year because of health problems in the spring.
Most of the CSAs around here cater more to the cities and unless you have one close by, it's too far to drive. They seem to be waning. We used to have two near here and another two just across the mountain but they have all gone belly up.
Big hugs to you too. Give me a holler if you need any gardening info, seed sources and so on. Get you some emergency seeds now unless you're growing heirlooms that you can seed save from.