The Fate of the Soil

The worst of the farm crisis is said to be over, but farmers are still killing themselves. The New York Times reports a rash of suicides in rural Oklahoma—some 100 deaths in less than two years. In Iowa, about 50 farmers have killed themselves each year since 1980. And in Missouri last year, to cite one more grim example of how serious today’s farm crisis is, 82 farmers took their own lives.

Even for farmers not so desperate as to be suicidal, life remains uncomfortable. Current national policy is to save “the” family farm by eliminating thousands of actual family farms. So it is hard for farmers who have survived on the farm to rejoice when many of their neighbors—whose friendship they counted on, whose children they watched grow, and whose parents they helped bury—have left their farms in despair.

Of course, all compassionate people (let alone all Christians) are concerned about what is happening down on the farm. But for most of us, the farm crisis remains emotionally if not geographically as distant as an African famine. This is so because more than 97 percent of us do not live on farms. The closest we get to the earth is our weekend gardens. And though we know better, we are inclined to think eggs are laid by the dozen. What compelling reasons have we to believe the farm crisis is anything more than another fuzzy image on the evening news?

Not A Miracle

The United States consistently stores 12 billion tons of surplus grain annually. Such surpluses largely account for the farm crisis, well-stocked supermarket shelves, and the fact that modern agriculture is hailed as miraculously productive.

We say “miraculously” because today’s farming seems to produce stupendous amounts of food out of thin air, requiring less land and fewer laborers than ever before. Of course, it is not miraculous. Technological agriculture is productive, but only in the short run.

Most crucially, it is not efficient with topsoil. Intensive cultivation, the planting of unrotated crops, and other methods of modern agriculture will cause soil loss at a rate of six inches in a century, a rate many times faster than nature can replace it.

Agricultural irrigation, meanwhile, is depleting ground water stores ten times faster than they are replenished. The Great Plains’s Ogallala Aquifer will support the present rates of pivot irrigation for 35 to 40 years at best. Irrigation also has a devastating side effect: over time it salts and kills the soil.

Finally, and soberingly, technological agriculture is heavily dependent on petroleum products. One estimate is that, without oil for fuel, pesticides, fertilizer, and the like, our agricultural yields would be one-fourth of what they are today.

In short, the supermarket shelves are full for us, but if we continue as we are, they will be bare for our near descendants. There will have to be radical changes in agriculture sooner or later. The demise of family farms is a sign of our unwillingness to face that fact. As family farms die, farming will be increasingly centralized and will require more concentrated applications of technological agriculture. We should be looking for ways to keep people on the land, not drive them into our already burdened cities.

Soil And The Biblical Drama

The farm crisis, however, quickly goes beyond the obvious—that supermarkets could be empty. It gets to the core of what we believe truly matters and what we hope for the future.

We came from dust and return to it. This basic biblical truth pervades biblical language (Adam was drawn from the earth—in Hebrew, adamah) and persists even in the language of modern culture ostensibly separated from the land (consider human and humus).

The Scriptures bind the fate of humanity to the fate of the soil, to the degree that the Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad can remark, “What is basic for man’s existence is his relation to the fertile soil.” Soil is integral to every part of the biblical drama. God’s creation, of course, renders the soil good on its own account (the earth is called good even prior to humanity’s creation).

But soil is also affected by sin, made “a waste” by God’s judgment (Zech. 7:13–14). The earth lies parched and its grass withered “because its people are so wicked” (Jer. 12:4). It groans and waits for the wholeness of redemption (Rom. 8:18–25). And since God promises a new heaven and a new Earth (Rev. 21), the land that wasted in God’s judgment will prosper in God’s new creation (Isa. 35:1–2).

Stewardship is based on the persistent biblical themes that God owns the land and invests it with a value both apart from and in service of human beings. The soil does not really belong to family farmers or to the corporations that are increasingly claiming it. It belongs to God (Lev. 25:23–24), and, as the sabbatical and Jubilee laws indicate, he expects it to be used with true care (Exod. 23:10–11; Lev. 25:8–24). The soil’s benefit is our benefit, and on more than one level. We depend on it for physical sustenance, but it is also the means through which God blesses us:

Fidelity springs up from earth

and justice looks down from heaven.

The Lord will add prosperity,

and our land shall yield its harvest.

(Ps. 85:11–12, NEB)

In Need Of Place

All Christians, then, and not merely farmers, have need for concern about the stewarding of the land. When the land is ill, we are physically and spiritually ill. The Old Testament’s pairing of human sin with the blight of the land is not quaint and irrelevant. Even in our urban enclaves, we are still Adam to the adamah, coming from, and responsible for, the soil.

We are in desperate need of the values that surround and grow out of the farmer’s elemental devotion to the land. Our urban and suburban societies are composed of transient, unrooted persons—people without a place. Biblical theologian Walter Brueggemann has perceptively written, “Place is space which has historical meanings, where some things have happened which are now remembered and which provide continuity and identity across generations.… Place is space in which vows have been exchanged, promises have been made, and demands been issued.… It is a declaration that our humanness cannot be found in escape, detachment, absence of commitment, and undefined freedom.”

A society lacking a sense of place and connection to the soil is—as the prophets would suggest—not accidentally plagued with climbing divorce rates, drug usage, shoddy craftsmanship, child neglect, and crime. A society without a sense of place simply does not care about the quality of its work and relationships or of the future, for it can imagine no enduring value or meaning. The family farm is one of our few remaining institutions where “planned obsolesence” is nonsensical and commitment is as essential as rain.

None of this is to say that the farm was or ever will be a utopia. We believe original sin extends beyond the curbside to the countryside. It is simply to say that urban Christians, in the supermarket and at church, have profound reason to care about the family farm. The fate of the soil is our fate, too.

By Rodney Clapp.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.