Soilborne pathogens
They can turn a healthy, promising crop into a failure within days.
They have discouraged would-be gardeners from trying to grow their own produce.
They have caused growers to rely on chemicals that have negative side effects.
They’re almost everywhere.
Here’s something amazing that I learned recently:
“For soil-borne pathogens, there is no correlation between the presence of the organism in the soil and the expression of the disease in the crop. Infections severe enough to produce crop loss are correlated with the absence of suppressive organisms more than the presence of the pathogen.” – https://johnkempf.com/managing-soil-borne-pathogens/
So the difference between healthy crops and crops dying of disease is not the presence of pathogens. The difference is the presence of good soil organisms, which strengthen the plants and suppress the pathogens.
There are striking similarities between us and plants.
I wish health leaders would pay more attention to building up the good, rather than just fighting the bad. And I wish politicians would do likewise. However, I’d like to mention something far more significant:
We all struggle with character defects. We all come to points of our lives when we realize that some of our character trails are terribly rotten. There’s hope. This hope does not lie in just clenching our fists and trying to do better, any more than the hope for truly healthy plants lies in a bunch of toxic chemicals.
The Bible principle is “overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21). All of us need to discover what this means – and experience how this works.