The yield is not in dispute; the terms are: horsepower governed by scale among the Amish, waste forbidden by bal tashchit, the technocratic paradigm indicted by Laudato si’ — and the Green Revolution’s billions fed, recorded in the same ledger.
Tagged: Agriculture and food Anabaptist Catholic Jewish
Liebig’s chemistry, the tractor, synthetic nitrogen (Haber–Bosch, 1909–1913), and the Green Revolution remade farming into an industry and fed billions; the traditions’ arguments concern the system’s terms — soil, animals, debt, scale — more than any single device. The Amish case again leads: some of the continent’s most productive small farms are horse-drawn by decision, and their yields are the standing refutation of the claim that the rule is nostalgia.
The Stance Register
Each stance is recorded with its rationale in the tradition's own terms and its sources. Where a tradition argues with itself, the register says so.
Anabaptist, Mennonite, and Amish Selectively adopted
The Ordnung governs method, not output: draft power and scale are kept at the size a family and a settlement can work and owe nothing on, while fertilizers, seeds, and much else are admitted. Hutterite colonies, holding goods in common, run fully mechanized large farms — the family’s own internal comparison, kept in this register because it isolates the variable: the rule is about ownership and scale, not horsepower.
- Donald B. Kraybill et al., The Amish (2013)
Catholic Contested within the tradition
Laudato si’ treats industrial agriculture under the technocratic paradigm: efficient and corrosive where it treats soil, water, and rural communities as inputs. The encyclical commends small-scale, diversified farming and the peasant agriculture of the poor as the system’s standing alternative — a position, not a nostalgia.
- Pope Francis, Laudato si’ (2015), §§120–129
Jewish Regulated
Bal tashchit — the prohibition of wasteful destruction, extended by the rabbis from Deuteronomy’s fruit trees to resources generally — grounds a Jewish environmental agriculture ethic; the sabbatical year (shmita) and its modern Israeli reinventions supply the institutional form.
- Deuteronomy 20:19–20 and its rabbinic extensions
See this register as a side-by-side comparison
References
- Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (1977)
- Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth (2001)
Related Across the Site
- Digital technology and community Flashpoint — Attention as the substance of community: streaming congregations and phone fasts, the industry’s own defectors making the ascetic argument, and the placement rules of the Amish applied to the pocket screen.
- emet Glossary Term — Firmness; faithfulness; truth.
- hesed Glossary Term — Steadfast love; covenant loyalty; mercy.
- mashiach Glossary Term — Anointed one.
- ruach Glossary Term — Breath; wind; spirit.
- Biblical Hebrew Language — The original language of the Hebrew Bible, preserved in the square script with Tiberian vocalization, and still the language of Jewish prayer.
- Twentieth Century Science Era — Relativity, quantum theory, and a priest’s Big Bang; war made science a state enterprise and the scientist’s conscience a public problem; creation-evolution litigation defined the American quarrel while genetics under Lysenko showed the cost of policing conclusions.
- Vaccination Technology — From Jenner’s parish campaigns to polio fatwas: mostly embraced, sometimes governed, and fought over in our century along lines that cross every tradition.