Intensive agriculture is another name people use to describe modern industrial farming. It depends totally on cheap and plentiful oil. It is not sustainable – people won’t be able to keep on doing it – because the oil will run out. And, worse, the oil farmers burn is damaging the planet by causing climate change. "World food production is at risk from farming methods that have degraded soils, parched aquifers (underground water sources), polluted waters, and caused the loss of animal and plant species," says a 2001 report [1]. Humans can't say they haven't been warned!  

1. World Resources Institute and the International Food Policy Research Institute report, February 2001.