Challenges of Modern-Day Farming

….and some surprising anwers!

Agriculture – this is a topic that concerns everybody: We all need to eat! Today, agriculture faces some huge challenges. The world population has exploded in the past decades and is still rising. At the same time, arable land tends to become smaller worldwide. In many parts of the world, including my region, people don’t suffer from food scarcity anymore. This is due to an intensification and some improvements in agriculture and thanks to imports from abroad. But this intensification of agriculture has caused great damage to our environment. Just today, this damage is becoming increasingly visible to us. 

The are no simple answers to agriculture’s challenges. Could there still be hope? This is what this article tries to explore.

Just 100 years ago, 40% of the people used to be farmers. Today, in Europe, around 4% of the population works in agriculture. This fact alone shows that a lot has changed since. 

On the social level…

Very few city kids nowadays know how carrots are cultivated or have experienced the milking of a cow. So, it is no surprise that an alienation of the city population from the farmers has taken place. 

In addition, these two issues also arise: Modern agricultural practices have changed a lot compared to just a few decades ago, which makes it even harder for farmers to explain what and why they are doing what they do. Plus, many of the environmental problems we are facing today are blamed on agriculture.

During my studies and through encounters with people working in agriculture, I have witnessed overflowing incomprehension and mistrust between farmers and non-farmers. Farmers often feel attacked and misunderstood by society, while negative media headlines generate ever more hostility towards them. For instance, many livestock farmers experienced insults or have their stables broken into by extreme animal rights activists. As always, each group considers itself as the “good ones”, while the others are the “bad ones”. 

On the economic level…

A lot has changed regarding the profitability and farm structure, too. Modern plant and animal breeding has brought significant progress. While an average cow in 1980 gave only around 4500 kg of milk per year, the average today is almost 9000 kg of milk per year. The amount has doubled thanks to animal breeding and feeding practices! It is similar for the most important farm crops. The yield of wheat in 1980 was around 5 tons per hectare, while today’s average is 7.5 tons per hectare. At a larger time frame, the increase is even more dramatic. The average yield of wheat in Germany in 1850 was around 1 tonne per hectare, while today it’s almost 8 tonnes per hectare!

Paradoxically, farmers today are having increasing difficulties making a living, because of the poor prices of their products. Many farmers are giving up on their farms. The remaining farms try to expand and work more efficiently to keep profitable. For example, many dairy farmers in Europe do not even create enough income to cover the bare production costs. In 2018, each month one to two dairy farmers closed down in Northern Germany. 

An added stressor for farmers is the increasing bureaucratic load they must handle. But is this an economic disadvantage just for the farmers? No, because the many regulations and laws burdening the farmers are costly to the national economy and thus, for all of us as well. 

Under these economic constraints, a farmer will think twice before, for example, he sows rye instead of wheat. Rye yields around 4 tons per hectare and is paid for much less than wheat with its 7.5 tons per hectare. For this reason, many farmers grow only a few different crops. In my region, this is typically rapeseed, wheat and barley. But from an agronomic and ecological viewpoint, it would be much better to grow a wide range of crops and catch crops*. However, the economy makes this a hard task. 

On the ecological level…

Ecologically, it is problematic to grow only three different crops – rapeseed, wheat, barley – on the same land, year after year. With such restricted variability, more pathogens develop in the soil, which means more pesticides must be applied. This is even worse with monocultures – cultivating the same crop every year. For instance, soybean in South America, palm oil in Asia and corn in Europe are commonly cultivated as monocultures. We all know that many pesticides have negative impacts on living beings, be it in the soil or in the air, or be it humans. Some pesticides are so persistent that, even after several decades after they are not used anymore, their residues can still be found in the groundwater. 

DDT was a widely used insecticide until its ban in many countries (in Germany it was banned in 1972). In some countries, such as India, it is still used. DDT affected different bird species and caused their eggshells to become so thin that some bird populations couldn’t raise their chicks anymore. Residues of pesticides can be found all across the globe: from the polar ice to the depths of the soil and groundwater. And these are just some examples of the negative environmental effects that can be caused by agriculture. 

My personal journey

Agriculture per se is an intervention into the ecological equilibrium of nature. This results in an imbalance, which nature will try to even out.

The image below describes this very well to me. It shows a penguin that stopped to examine the footprints the photographer left behind. “It’s a reminder that, however brief our visits, our presence leaves a mark.”

With everything we do on Earth, we leave traces behind, be it traces that bring healing or destruction. But to what extent can we intervene in nature? How far is too far? How much liberty can we take in our “taming of nature” – agriculture, that is? From the very beginnings of agriculture, man has battled with nature. We find this imagery on the very first pages of the Jewish Torah, in the account of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden:

“…the ground is cursed because of you, through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you…”**

Through my study of agricultural sciences, I’m learning more and more about the worrying state of our ecosystems. I asked myself whether a kind of agriculture in which people, nature and the Creator live in harmony was even possible? So, I prayed:

“God, you are the Creator of all things, you have created both humans and the natural world. Somehow, we must feed ourselves from nature. How did you envision agriculture?”

Here, an exciting journey began for me, and it still continues. I’m far from having all the answers, but God began to show me some deeper, underlying causes behind all the issues I brought up in this article. 

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Would you like to follow me on my quest for answers? You might end up surprised by what I found out on this journey! The next article in this three-part series is going to explore the core of the above-mentioned problems.

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* catch crops are crops that are grown between successive plantings of a main crop

** The Bible: Genesis 3, 17-18