Modern Agriculture Is Failing!
The biggest problem in the glowing predictions we have just read is that there is NOTHING which can quickly, practically, cheaply and effectively be put to work in solving our race with worldwide famine!
A lot of the projections sound good. Some may even come to pass in carefully controlled experiments or on small acreages in rich countries like the U.S. But this is a far cry from having the capital and skilled manpower to be useful on a large scale.
Besides, too often the glamorous-sounding projects deal with relatively minor factors as far as food production is concerned. The really BIG problems of shrinking available arable land through erosion, salt destruction and urban development, a sinking water table, and the continuing general worldwide decline in soil fertility are almost totally ignored. Little or nothing is being done to solve these major problems. In fact, these modern practices are all too often hastening the destruction of this priceless resource.
Just look at the end result of many of the "successful" practices of modern farming, such as chemical pesticides and fertilizers, drugs, antibiotics in feeds, hybrids, etc.
The truth is that every one of these practices is largely at odds with nature. Thus they are breaking laws which exact penalties. Because the penalty does not always immediately appear — at least not in fullness — it is too often assumed that a penalty does not exist. But a delayed penalty simply means that the disastrous effects are accumulating and will in due time be released in full fury. So some of these unnatural practices may appear to be successful — until we start to reap the penalty.
Pesticides and fertilizers, for example, have been hailed for contributing to greater yields and an increased food supply. But they also have been quietly and steadily killing soil life (earthworms, beneficial bacteria, fungi, and other organisms), causing erosion and pollution, and producing inferior food that is bringing sickness and suffering to mankind. The widespread evils of DDT, as only one example, are just beginning to be recognized by governments around the world.
When soil begins to show signs of depletion, it ought to be rested and carefully built up. Chemicals just mask the problem while they continue to further deplete the land.
Inferior quality is also evident in many new strains of plants. The widely hailed varieties of rice such as IR-8, for example, not only need huge amounts of chemical fertilizers and water, but they are also very highly susceptible to disease.
Our stock is likewise in a very precarious position. Feeds containing antibiotics have taken away from the animals their natural capacity to resist disease. Veterinarians warn we are "flirting with a tragedy" in this area. Now it is feared this lack of resistance may be transmissible to humans via the meat.
We know of feedlots where the animals have been so doped with drugs and concentrated feeds that the manure of these animals will not even decompose! The producers try to solve this problem by feeding the manure back to the animals!
Money-Motivated
An estimated 85 percent of American cattle are given stilbestrol — "Queen of the Hormones." It has been known to cause lower carcass quality, prolapse of the rectum and blockage of the urinary tract in cows. It lowers the grade of the carcass and gives the meat a watery, mushy appearance. It is suspected to cause cancer and the appearance of female characteristics in men who consume the beef so treated. Why is it used? Because 16 cents worth of stilbestrol can bring up to twelve dollars worth of profit!
Even mechanization and automation can be bad when taken to an extreme or improperly used. Mechanization has greatly speeded up man's ability to abuse the earth. The moldboard plow, for example, has helped convert far larger acreages into deserts than man has managed to transform into productive farmlands.
Heavy farm machinery that packs the soil and destroys soil life is not good.
Neither is it good to coop up thousands of chickens in small cages so they can be automatically fed and watered at the expense of the birds' health and where disease could quickly wipe out the entire flock.
This is a major reason the price of eggs in many areas of the U.S. jumped to $1.00 and more per dozen this past winter. A disease of epidemic proportion in many areas killed tens of thousands of laying hens in just such poultry operations. The resulting egg shortage and increased expense in securing eggs from greater distances was reflected in higher prices to the consumer. These money-motivated practices often cost money!
And then there are the social and economic consequences of modern agriculture. The cost-price squeeze drives many small farmers off the land into already-overcrowded cities to try to eke out an existence there. While the big farmers squeeze all they can out of the land, the cost-price squeeze is also slowly but surely closing in on them.
In utter incongruity, the government pays for taking some cropland out of production to relieve the surplus; meanwhile the fanner tries as hard as he can to create a surplus by forcing as much as possible from his remaining land so he can make a living!
And all the while agri-business debts pile higher and higher. Farmers are forced to take out ever-bigger loans until they owe the bank or other lending agencies their entire assets.
And in the underdeveloped, hungry countries? There the limited agricultural resources (and almost all fertilizer) is used to grow cash crops such as coffee, peanuts, etc. These products are then exported to get foreign currency. Meanwhile the local people suffer from malnutrition and hunger.
The Overview
Not all of the particular conveniences and practices of modern agriculture are bad by any means. But looking at the whole picture in overview, any way you want to evaluate it — nutritionally, economically, socially, politically — the practices and methods of modern agriculture are failing miserably. A drastic, earthshaking CHANGE is urgently needed.
We bring to you Good News that that change is coming!
It is true that in the immediate future, man is going to lose the race with famine. Our free booklet Famine — Can We Survive? makes that bitter fact plain. Developed and undeveloped nations alike — including America, -Britain, and the other English-speaking countries — will suffer. This famine will result, not only from our physical sins, of which wrong agricultural practices are an important part, but also from direct punishment at the hand of God for our terrible spiritual sins.
But once this "small moment" of punishment is over (Isa. 54:7-8) and we have learned our lesson, the conditions described at the outset of this article will become reality. Here is how your Bible shows this marvelous transformation will take place.
Changing the Earth's Face
Today there is great difficulty in growing food for the earth's inhabitants. Why? Because in addition to upset weather and wrong agricultural practices much of the land area of the earth is desert, mountainous, jungle — unusable for food production. To man, a solution to this problem looks impossible. But God has the solution!
Simply make most of the earth cultivatable! Reduce the bare, snow-swept and craggy mountains, raise up some of the deep, arid desert valleys, CHANGE the world weather patterns. Make the deserts green and fertile! Open up huge areas of the earth such as the Kalahari Desert in Bechuanaland, the Lake Chad basin in French Equatorial Africa, the world-known Sahara, Gobi and great American deserts. Make verdant the vast wastes of Mongolia, Siberia, Saudi Arabia and many of the Western United States.
Uncover the deep ice packs and snowdrifts, the permafrost and tundra from the vast, almost limitless, expanses of Antarctica, North America, Greenland, Northern Europe and Siberia. Make LEVEL the awesome Pamir Knot, the huge giants of the Himalayas, the Atlas, Taurus, Pyrenees, Rockies, Sierras and Hindu Kush — reshape the immense sweep of the Andes, and all the other forbidding, towering, virtually uninhabitable mountains of the earth. Remember, the mountains were formed!
Great forces caused gigantic upheavals, or huge cracks and slippages in the crust of the earth. Massive blocks of granite lunged up into the sky — the earth rocking and reeling in the throes of the greatest earthquakes in history. Mountains were MADE — they didn't just happen.
The God of ALL power, who FORMED the hills and mountains (Amos 4:13, Psalm 90:2), will RE-form them — will RE-shape the surface of this earth! This does Snot mean that there will be no mountains or hills in Tomorrow's World. Isaiah 55:12 and other scriptures show there will be. Not only do mountains and hills give beauty and variety, but they are also necessary for a balanced ecological system. Many plants and animals do better on sloping terrain than on a completely level landscape.
Read of the huge EARTHQUAKES yet to come which will directly accomplish much of the rehabilitation of the land surfaces (see Rev. 16:18; Zech. 14:4). Yes, multiple millions of acres of unbelievably fertile, productive, wonderful farmland will suddenly become available — just waiting to be pioneered and rightly developed and used. Impossible?
In the hands of man — certainly! But not in the hands of God.