By Alina Voss, ACC Communications Director
“Creation is not in any sense independent of the Creator, the result of a primal creative act long over and done with, but is the continuous, constant participation of all creatures in the being of God.” – Wendell Berry, Christianity and the Survival of Creation
A century ago, Americans watched the land turn on them.
Homesteaders across the southern plains spent the 1910s and 1920s turning 5.2 million acres of prairie into wheat fields. In the process, they had severed the roots of the native grasses that had previously kept the earth steady through centuries of drought and flood cycles, leaving the land with nothing left to protect it. Some 850 million tons of topsoil blew off in 1935 alone, and a single storm in May of 1934 carried Oklahoma and Texas dirt two thousand miles east, dusting the desks of Washington on its way out.
The apocalyptic scene was one of our own making. We had refused to let the land rest, forgetting that Sabbath was never ours to give.
The late Wendell Berry was scathing when referencing the hypocrisies he saw between Christianity and Christians’ in-practice stewardship of creation. That indictment lands squarely on the chin of American agriculture, which has sped up to keep pace with American life rather than meet the rhythms of biblical stewardship.
“We will discover that, for these reasons, our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God’s gifts into his face, as of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.” – Wendell Berry
Blasphemy is a strong word for a farming practice, though the pace of American life makes it easy to forget that rest is neither a reward nor a regulation imposed on a broken world. Rather, it was written into creation before the Fall of man and long before it was inscribed into stone on Mount Sinai. Rest, like good work, is part of the rhythm of the created world.
To be a created being is to be limited, not just in metaphysical ways but in the tangible, physical realities of the earth we occupy. In this way, sabbath is not something we grant to God, it’s something we observe. Sabbath is, in perhaps its most direct form, the practice of admitting that we are not the Creator. If the creator of the universe rested on the seventh day, refusal to engage in Sabbath is a form of arrogance.
Rest is woven into the fabric of the created world itself, not just a feature of the work week. Leviticus and Exodus give the fields a sabbath of their own, instructing Israel to work the land for six years and then to leave the seventh alone entirely, with whatever came up on its own left for the poor and the wild animals. The command was as literal as it sounds, telling a subsistence farming society to stop farming for a year and to trust that the sixth year’s harvest would carry them through the gap.
That trust had already been tested in the wilderness, where manna gathered beyond the day’s need bred worms and stank by morning, spoiling in the hands of the people who had tried to store it. The reasoning behind both is explained in Leviticus: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me.” Israel farmed as a tenant, and the rest it owed was written into the lease.
American farming would look unrecognizable to a culture that left its fields fallow on purpose. The advent of cheap fertilizer made fallow years begin to look like waste, and they dropped out of the rotation soon after. By the 1970s Earl Butz, Nixon’s agriculture secretary, was urging farmers to plant fencerow to fencerow and to “get big or get out.” Our posture toward the land changed, though the land itself had not. We have gone on asking more of finite ground by whatever means each decade’s technology allows, and the costs have come due in the soil and in the water underneath it.
In Leviticus and 2 Chronicles, the exile is described as the land finally enjoying the sabbaths the Israelites denied it. This is more than a biblical metaphor, it is part of our reality living in the created world: rest happens either way. The choice we have is whether sabbath is given freely or if the land must come to collect its due.
Researchers mapped the Corn Belt and found that nearly 100 million acres, more than a third of the region, has lost its A horizon entirely. This dark, carbon-rich topsoil provides the main biological foundation for plant growth and nutrient absorption, and it’s being washed away from our fields. Chemical fertilizers are unable to make up the gap, either. The loss already stands at roughly 6% of corn and soybean yields, close to $3 billion a year in economic losses.
Water is going the same way. Western Kansas draws its share of groundwater nine times faster than precipitation is able to refill it, and more than 80% of the water once stored under some countries is already gone. This is forcing farmers to revert to dryland, meaning farming on rainfall alone – rainfall that in western Kansas runs under 20 inches a year. Corn will not reliably grow on that, so the ground goes to wheat and sorghum at a fraction of the value. These crops often only yield every other year while the land sits bare to bank moisture for the next crop.
“The world, that God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal. The church, then, becomes a kind of preserve of “holiness,” from which certified lovers of God dash out to assault and plunder the “secular” earth.” – Wendell Berry
Our relationship to the land need not be a series of booms and busts, nor do we need to reject modern agriculture outright. We just need to rediscover a rhythm of rest and recovery. Aligning our farming methods and, importantly, the financial infrastructure and public policies that support them, with this rhythm is the harder half of the work. The practice itself is simple enough: keep something living in the ground year-round, rotate what is planted, disturb the soil as little as possible, and incorporate animals where it makes sense. A cover crop does what fallow was meant to do, holding moisture and rebuilding organic matter, and does it better, since living roots hold soil that bare ground surrenders to the elements. It also does something fallow never could, because a cover crop can be grazed or cut for forage, so the land takes its rest while families eat.
“Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air…will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine, which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.” – Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry’s argument at its core was that good work honors the work of God, making how we farm a religious question whether or not we treat it as one. Scripture promises that there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, and the rest a field takes is a small sign pointing toward that larger one. We do not solve sabbath, we submit to it. The land will have its rest either way.
Alina Voss is the Communications Director at the American Conservation Coalition.
That’s why every 7 years in Israel, there’s a Shmita year where the land doesn’t produce.