I wonder how our land would be if we obeyed the command which God gave to give a year of Sabbath rest to it every seventh year when it would be neither sown nor harvested: "a year of rest it is to the land".

Surely we wouldn't need to pump in so much artificial feeding for the earth to continue producing for us. And surely if we lived off the produce we already had for two years there would not be so much waste, mountains of butter and wheat? Surely what we saved in costs and work we could use instead to distribute food around the world.

How precious is rest and how we ignore it and suffer the consequences. Our land has to be artificially fertilised every year with tons of fertiliser dug out of, raided from other areas of our earth and transported and sold in order to enable the land to cope with year after year of giving to the crop ...