U.S. agriculture is so productive that even natural disaster doesn’t threaten food supply as much as it once did.

Remember how we absolutely had to pass a farm bill in 2012, to save us from that year’s drought, which was the most extensive in half a century ?

Well, “[i]t is now clear that the impact of the drought on retail food prices will be smaller than initially forecast,” the USDA reports.“The inflationary pressure of the drought has been offset by factors such as decreased exports of many U.S. agricultural products, a stronger U.S. dollar, low energy price inflation, and decreased prices for many commodities not affected by the drought.”

Food-supply alarmism is a staple theme of ag-lobby propaganda. The menace this year is a spike in milk prices — to $8 a gallon! — if there’s no farm bill and the government is forced to buy up the supply, per an obscure 1949 law.