It’s unsustainable. Absent transition, collapse is inevitable.

We hear a lot about how we’re running out of antibiotics. But we are also doomed to run out of pesticides, because insects inevitably develop resistance, whether toxic chemicals are sprayed directly or genetically engineered into the plants.

Worse yet, weeds, insects, and fungus develop resistance in just 5 years on average, which has caused the chemicals to grow increasingly lethal over the past 60 years. And it takes on average eight to ten years to identify, test, and develop a new pesticide, though that isn’t long enough to discover the long-term toxicity to humans and other organisms.

And this devil’s bargain hasn’t even provided most of the gains in crop yields, which is due to natural-gas and phosphate fertilizers plus soil-crushing tractors and harvesters that can do the work of millions of men and horses quickly on farms that grow only one crop on thousands of acres.

Yet before pesticides, farmers lost a third of their crops to pests, after pesticides, farmers still lose a third of their crops.

Even without pesticides, industrial agriculture is doomed to fail from extremely high rates of soil erosion and soil compaction at rates that far exceed losses in the past, since soil couldn’t wash or blow away as easily on small farms that grew many crops.

But pest killing chemicals are surely accelerating the day of reckoning sooner rather than later. Enormous amounts of toxic chemicals are dumped on land every year — over 1 billion pounds are used in the United State (US) every year and 5.6 billion pounds globally (Alavanja 2009).

This destroys the very ecosystems that used to help plants fight off pests, and is a major factor biodiversity loss and extinction.

Evidence also points to pesticides playing a key role in the loss of bees and their pollination services. Although paleo-diet fanatics won’t mind eating mostly meat when fruit, vegetable, and nut crops are gone, they will not be so happy about having to eat more carbohydrates. Wheat and other grains will still be around, since they are wind-pollinated.

Agricultural chemicals render land lifeless and toxic to beneficial creatures, also killing the food chain above — fish, amphibians, birds, and humans (from cancer, chronic disease, and suicide).