It's less difficult (although still not a breeze) for companies like Tyson, John Deere, Cargill, etc. If you pick a major manufacturing company near you, that's producing non-luxury goods or essential goods, you can expect to have a reasonable idea of how they'll hold their value in adverse market conditions.

I want to be really clear - I'm assuming ALL of the advice in this article is "disaster planning" advice. It's not going to maximize returns, but it can give you ownership of an asset that is likely to survive things like rapid inflation, or other unexpected series of events.

Maximizing returns is often counter to this idea - because it almost always implies taking on additional risk, which is not ideal for disaster scenarios.