Dear God,

I am studying agriculture, and one of the things that’s being discussed is interplanting. The idea is that a field will be more productive if more than one crop is planted in the same field. The idea is that insect pests and plant diseases will have a more difficult time getting a strong hold and devastating an entire crop if one plant is mixed in with others. The fertility of the soil is also supposed to be preserved, and soil erosion is decreased.

In spite of all of this, I read in the Book of Leviticus that you forbid interplanting in agriculture. You prescribe monoculture, just one kind of seed planted in any field. This is one of those commandments that’s never included in the popular list of the Ten Commandments, but there it is: “Thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed”.

Why not? Why are you so strongly opposed to anything but monoculture?

- Bart

Bart,

The essential issue is strip malls. I like strip malls. I really like it when you can go between different cities and find the same store in similar strip malls. The consistency is really nice. One store looks pretty much like another, and that’s soothing to my sensibilities.

You have to understand the historical context of Leviticus. Back when Leviticus was written, humanity was not technologically or culturally prepared for strip malls, so I had to prepare the way for the coming of the strip mall.

Agriculture was a great way to train people, to get them ready to build strip malls, when the time was right. Getting all one kind of plant grown in one field at a time, in row after row of identical plants, got rid of all the nasty unexpected scattering found in nature. It was a preparation for factories to mass produce the items to fill up the dollar stores and chain stores all over the world, just one item from one factory, sent out everywhere.

If you have fields with interplanted crops, well, you might as well just have merchants setting up booths to sell whatever they’ve got wherever they can find a place to sell it. Do you know what that leads to?

It leads to haggling. Haggling is next to godlessness.

- God

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 5:33 pm and is filed under All God's Advice, Science and technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.