Of course the death of the soil does not bankrupt farmers, this is just a nasty side effect of industrial farming. What bankrupt the farmers is that industrial

Of course the death of the soil does not bankrupt farmers, this is just a nasty side effect of industrial farming. What bankrupt the farmers is that industrial farming does increase the yield of a given field at the cost of relying in an ever increasing and more advanced industrial inputs. This has the double effect of increasing both the fixed (machinery) and variable (GMO seeds, pesticides, fertilizers) costs, while at the same time increasing the offer and saturating demand. The farmers find themselves in the predicament to ever increase production just to survive on an ever decreasing margins. And when they can no longer afford the fancy inputs, the soil is already dead so they end up the proud owner of a wasteland and go belly up. It would be hard to come up with sources for all of these assertions, specially in an informal debate, but for starters look at: http://www.joshuabradley.org/green_revolution/index.html http://www.joshuabradley.org/green_revolution/index.html