Huls Farm, Gardar Farm and Easter Farm: Located thousands of miles apart, these three farms have some very eerie similarities. And as far-flung as these farms might be, they contain a lesson for America.

Huls Farm and Gardar Farm were the largest, most prosperous and most technologically advanced farms in their respective territories. Farming operations centered around spectacular state-of-the-art barns for sheltering and milking cows. Both farms let their cows graze on lush pastures during the summer and harvested their own feed to provide for their cattle through the winter. Both increased their hay production by irrigating their fields. Both farms were similar in size and kept roughly the same number of cows (165 vs. 200).

Easter Farm was prosperous too. Its many poultry houses housed thousands of chickens. Resourceful planting techniques made sweet potato production another major contributor to the farm’s successful operation.

The owners of these farms were leaders in their respective communities. Each considered himself a religious person. On Gardar and Easter, the owners even led the community’s religious services. And each farm was very open to receiving visitors. Similarly located in magnificent rural settings, Gardar and Huls attracted tourists from great distances. Easter Farm was also set against a beautiful, lush backdrop. However, despite its tropical setting, its owners received few—if any—guests.

But what distinguishes Hul from Gardar and Easter isn’t these farms’ past; it’s their present.

Huls Farm is a family-owned enterprise now operated by five siblings in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, in the western United States. It is currently prospering, selling milk to thousands of people each year. The farm’s neighbors are likewise prospering, and the county boasted one of the highest population growth rates in the country not long ago.

After a look at its high-tech operation, computer-guided machinery and modern amenities, it might seem inconceivable that Huls Farm could collapse in the foreseeable future. But agricultural collapse is exactly what Huls—and America—may be headed for. At least, that’s what Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond and a growing body of concerned agricultural experts and soil scientists say.

But sometimes it is easy to be blinded—even when collapse is on the doorstep.

Meanwhile, Back at the Farm …

Huls Farm, Gardar Farm and Easter Farm, as described in detail by Diamond in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, foreshadow a troubling future on America’s farm horizon. Gardar Farm, the former estate of the Norse bishop of Greenland, was abandoned over 500 years ago. Greenland Norse society “collapsed completely,” says Diamond. “[I]ts thousands of inhabitants starved to death, were killed in civil unrest or in war against an enemy or emigrated, until nobody remained alive.” The remnants of the Gardar barn’s stone walls and those of the nearby Gardar Cathedral, along with the foundations of hundreds of other homes, still stand—testifying to the progressive society that once flourished.

Easter Farm also stands as a warning. Located 2,300 miles west of Chile and 1,300 miles east of Polynesia’s Pitcairn Islands, this once-prosperous tropical island lies virtually abandoned in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But plenty of stone testaments still proclaim its inhabitants’ former grandeur. Who can gaze on the treeless, deserted shores of Easter Island and not wonder where such monuments came from: almost 400 gigantic stone statues—up to 70 feet tall, weighing 270 tons? Not to mention hundreds of stone chicken houses dotting the countryside. It was a puzzle the first Europeans couldn’t comprehend. When they arrived on this treeless island, they met a couple thousand starving savages living in caves.

Easter Farm is another story of dramatic collapse.

Yet when Norse Greenland and Easter Island were prospering, their decline seemed as inconceivable as does the decline of high-tech Huls Farm and U.S. agriculture today.

Here’s the worrying part: Norse Greenland, Easter Island and Huls Farm share one very dangerous common denominator.

Though one may be tempted to believe that the name “Greenland” was just a clever marketing technique, palynologists, biologists and archaeologists now believe that green may actually have been an apt description of the land at the time of Viking settlement. When the Norse arrived, they found a place that, although colder than most of Europe, was teeming with reindeer, musk ox, seals and ocean life. The Norsemen had discovered a virgin landscape that had never been logged or grazed. Tall grasses covered much of the coast and fjord inlets. At higher elevations, sedges and shrubs dominated the landscapes.

The land was prosperous enough to attract 5,000 Vikings by a.d 1000.

But even though initially affluent, the Greenland Norse eventually starved.

The inhabitants destroyed their own soil.

When the settlers arrived, they immediately implemented slash-and-burn agriculture. They cut down even more trees for construction and fuel. More wood yet was used for fuel to smelt iron. Widespread livestock grazing and trampling prevented trees from regenerating. Pigs especially damaged the forests, causing so much trouble that the settlers eventually got rid of them. The Norse deforested the land.

Perhaps the most damaging to Greenland were the sheep and goats. As the settler population grew, the number of sheep and goats required to feed the populace exploded. But from a soil perspective, intensive sheep grazing was disastrous.

In the cool, windy climate, with short growing seasons, overgrazing exposed the soil to the gusty arctic blasts. Whole valleys lost their topsoil to erosion. In the area surrounding the once-prosperous Norse farm, to this day all that remain are stones.

The demise of Greenland’s soil is well-chronicled. From lake mud, scientists can identify the types and the relative abundance of plant species. Dating techniques help confirm the date estimates. A picture emerges: Prior to the Viking arrival, the remainders of plants and leaves, as well as seeds and pollen counts, show that trees dominated the landscape.

For thousands of years there were few changes in vegetation, and few or no signs of deforestation and erosion—until the Vikings arrived. Then layers of charcoal from Viking fires to clear pastures are found. Pollen of willow and birch trees is replaced with pollen from grasses, sedges, weeds and pasture crops introduced by the Norse. Greater and greater amounts of topsoil were deposited in lakes, and as the topsoil was blown away, greater amounts of the underlying sand became deposited in the lakes too.

Interestingly, according to Diamond, all of these changes later reversed, indicating a recovery of the environment after the Viking settlements became extinct in the 1400s. However, the environmental changes that accompanied the Norse set in again in 1924 after the Danish government reintroduced sheep farming to Greenland.

As Greenland soils eroded and the trees disappeared, there were other consequences. No more timber for ships. No more timber for construction, furniture or fuel. Food could not be easily imported. Fewer Greenland ships left their ports. Trade dwindled and then disappeared.

But a starving people are resourceful, so collapse didn’t happen all at once. They began burning livestock dung and bones for fuel, but this reduced the amount of fertilizer they had for their fields, causing more food problems. They then began digging up and burning peat from the few peat bogs that were present. Because there was no wood, planks became a prized possession. They built homes of sod. Some homes were estimated to have required 10 acres of turf. More turf yet was burned for fuel. And in the cool climate, it took many, many years for that turf to be replaced, if it ever was.

But the end result was that throughout this process, the Greenland Norse were destroying the most important thing their survival depended on: their soil.

Without fertile soil, you have no grass, no trees, no fuel, no food.

Eventually it got so bad that the Vikings were too weak and too few to defend themselves. After a couple of bad years, the last ones were killed off by Inuit raiders in the 1400s. The Viking society had collapsed.

Easter Farm

The collapse of Easter Farm—though just as avoidable—was far more dramatic. Easter Farm involved the virtual extinction of a culture that may have involved a population of over 15,000 at its peak. And in this case, no cold climates or outside invaders could be blamed.

Today, Easter Island is a dry, treeless, unproductive island. But it wasn’t always that way.

When its first Polynesian inhabitants arrived, they found a lush, forested island complete with a diverse ecosystem of many different birds, reptiles and other species. When cleared, the land produced abundant quantities of sweet potatoes, and was ideal for raising poultry—two sources of food the islanders brought with them.

But soil erosion destroyed Easter Island just as effectively as it did the Greenland Norse.

In Easter Island’s case, religious competition led to the complete deforestation of the island, the soil’s destruction, and thus societal collapse.

Everyone wanted to have the biggest idol. Tribes competed to carve, transport and erect massive stone statues. Some of the statues weighed tens of tons. The bigger, the better—the more prestige the tribe had. But all that work required a lot of trees for levers, sleds, rollers, support structures and rope. It also required intensified food production to feed all the workers, who were racing to erect the biggest, best and most statues.

The whole focus of society was geared toward carving the massive stone heads. So they cut down all the trees to put up a bunch of rocks.

The forests were burned for cropland. And when that soil was depleted of its minerals and nutrients, the islanders moved on to the next patch.

When environmental collapse came, evidence suggests the people of Easter Island didn’t even see it coming.

If you visit the island today, you can still see all the stone tools—the hammers, chisels, picks, etc.—the islanders used to carve the statues, just lying around haphazardly as if one day they just stopped work and never came back.

Many of the massive stone heads are still in the quarry, in various stages of completion. Other stone statues dot the countryside—still in transit to their intended resting place.

One day everything just fell apart.

Just like with the Greenland Norse, as the trees disappeared, there was nothing to hold the soil. Wind and rain did the rest. As the topsoil eroded, soil fertility dropped and production plummeted. It wasn’t long before the islanders were starving. Also, without trees, they could no longer build boats or nets, which meant they couldn’t catch fish either.

It is quite amazing when you think about it. They were so focused on their stone idols that they didn’t realize they were killing themselves.

Norse Greenland and Easter Island are just two of many past societies—including the Pitcairn, the Anasazi, the Mayan—that have collapsed or vanished due at least in part to poor agricultural practices. Anybody who has traveled through the dusty, barren, rock-strewn nations of Spain, Greece, Lebanon, Egypt and 4,000 miles of North Africa has personally witnessed how poor agricultural practices can destroy a once-productive land! Because of unhealthy farming practices, Gardar Farm and Easter Farm did just what Diamond described: Collapsed.

Unfortunately, America is plowing this same row.

Farming Like There’s No Tomorrow

The era of cheap and abundant food is drawing to a close. America’s soils are facing a crisis.

This last year, Iowa—the corn basket of America—was ravaged by some of the worst soil erosion in its history. The New York Times called the rainstorms of last June “catastrophic.” They created gullies 200 feet wide. Ten percent of Iowa’s cropland suffered “severe” erosional damage during just this one event.

As catastrophic as the flooding was, it was made much worse because of America’s everyday farming practices, which often promote soil erosion. In some areas, topsoil has been reduced to practically nil. Back in the mid-1980s, Norman Berg, the former head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service, said that one third of America’s “really good cropland” was suffering net soil loss, with some of it eroding at 10 times the sustainable limit.

And although some progress has been made with low- and no-till techniques, most farming techniques continue to force the land. Removing vegetation cover promotes erosion. And it doesn’t take massive floods to steal away the soil. Each and every day, exposed cropland steadily allows more soil to be washed away into lakes and rivers during normal rain events.

Massive monoculture farming operations plant the same crops year after year after year, depleting the soil of vital nutrients.

Animals have been taken off the farms.

To maintain productivity, farmers dump increasing amounts of pesticides and fertilizers on the land. Meanwhile, the natural, healthy soil-dwelling microbes get chemically burned.

Soils are so damaged that little would grow if not for pesticides and fertilizers. Fertilizers may have pushed yields up for a while, but they will only work for so long. Each year a little more is required.

Now some scientists wonder if we are reaching a tipping point.

But is it too late? Even if poor farming techniques were halted, soils would take many years to fully recover—if they ever could.

America is facing the same agricultural problems that many other societies have faced—and we are destroying our soils even faster. The only difference is that America was blessed with some of the most fertile and extensive soils in the world to begin with, so we have been able to get away with greater abuse. But, just as the Bible prophesied in passages such as Leviticus 26:19-20, that agricultural prosperity is being stripped away.

Did you know, however, that the Bible also talks about very specific agricultural practices that would prevent soil erosion and degradation, yet promote superior yields? Some recent studies have already illustrated that organic farming techniques can produce yields that are comparable to and even greater than those produced by conventional methods. And that does not take into account all biblically described practices.

The Bible also predicts that a dramatic revolution in agriculture is just around the corner! To see a vision of what this agricultural utopia will look like, read The Wonderful World Tomorrow—What It Will Be Like, by Herbert W. Armstrong.