The long-term sustainability of agricultural systems concerns diverse groups of people

They emphasize different aspects of sustainability, from land steward- ship and family farms, to low external-input methods and food safety.Often there are two different themes: sustainability defined primarily in terms of resource conservation and profitability, and sustainability defined in terms of pressing social problems in the food and agriculture system.Each of these perspectives has been illustrated by William Lockeretz1 and Miguel Altieri.2 In his review article on sustainability, Lockeretz documented primarily production-oriented components of sustainability.Altieri, on the other hand, has pointed out that concentration on only the technological aspects of sustainability results in, among other things, failure to distill the root causes of non-sustainability in agriculture.While sustainability efforts need to address both social and technical issues, they frequently overemphasize the technical, a problem we see originating in the way sustainability is often defined.Our purpose in this paper is to discuss concerns about current sustainability definitions and suggest a definition based upon a broader perspective.Among those working in sustainability there is often a feeling that we need to devote less time to talking about the meaning of sustainable agriculture and more time to implementing it.While this is an understandable position, especially for those directly involved in production agriculture, it also expresses a contradiction.How can we form an improved agricultural system if it has not yet been clearly conceptualized? Lockeretz1 queries, “Isn’t something backwards here?” and shows that, although there is a surge of interest in agricultural sustainability, “even its most basic ideas remain to be worked out.” There is no generally accepted set of goals for sustainable agriculture, and little agreement even on what and who it is we intend to sustain.Is it possible, for example, to both sustain production levels and preserve the natural environment? Who should we work to sustain – farmers, consumers, future generations – or should all of them be our priorities? Can we truly sustain one group without considering others? Without clarifying these goals the necessary changes in cultural, infra- structural, technological, and political arenas are difficult to negotiate.If we want sustainable agriculture to pursue a path differentiable from that of conventional agriculture,vertical hydroponic nft system we need to explicitly state and gain some consensus on these goals.A clear, comprehensive definition of sustainability forms the necessary theoretical foundation for articulating sustainability goals and objectives.

The emergence of agricultural sustainability reflects many people’s dissatisfaction with conventional agricultural priorities, especially the extent to which short-term economic goals have been emphasized over environmental and social goals.In response, a number of agricultural sustainability concepts have been developed under the terms “alternative,” “regenerative,” “organic,” “low-input,” and “sustainable.” In this paper we refer to those definitions most commonly espoused in the agricultural research community, definitions which are predominant in the literature and are used as the basis of sustainability programs.We examine what priorities these definitions embody, how these priorities relate to those expressed in conventional agriculture, and how developing sustainability would benefit by broadening these priorities.Although sustainability definitions include a range of environmental, economic, and social characteristics, most focus somewhat narrowly on environment, resource conservation, productivity, and farm- and firm-level profitability.Charles Francis4 defines sustainable agriculture as a “management strategy” whose goal is to reduce input costs, minimize environmental damage, and provide production and profit over time.The National Research Council5 defines alternative agriculture as food or fiber production which employs ecological production strategies to reduce inputs and environmental damage while promoting profitable, efficient, long-term production.For Richard Harwood6 the three principles for sustainable agriculture are: “the inter relatedness of all parts of a farming system, including the farmer and his family; the importance of the many biological balances in the system; the need to maximize use of material and practices that disrupt those relation- ships.” According to Vernon Ruttan7 enhanced productivity must be a key factor in any sustainability definition.Rod MacRae, Stuart Hill, John Henning, and Guy Mehuys8 adopt a sustainability definition which emphasizes environmentally sound production practices.They note that sustainable agriculture today is characterized mainly by products and practices which minimize environmental degradation, although they also point out the potential to move beyond this restrictive application.

In his review of sustainable agriculture definitions, Lockeretz1 stresses agronomic considerations although he does note the connection between changing production practices and associated socioeconomic transformations.Sustainability definitions such as the above focus on environmental conservation which is to be achieved through changing farm production practices without reducing farmers’ profits.They challenge some but not all of the assumptions that underlie agriculture’s non-sustainable aspects, generally neglecting questions of equity or social justice, or devoting little specific language to it.Altieri,2 for one, has challenged the narrowness of these approaches and their implicit assumption that taking care of the environmental, production, and economic aspects of sustainability automatically takes care of social aspects: “Intrinsic to these [agroecology] projects is the conviction that, as long as the proposed systems benefit the environment and are profitable, sustainability will eventually be achieved and all people will benefit.” Altieri has noted that without intervention on policy, research, and other levels, the more appropriate technology developing in the name of sustainability will merely perpetuate and enhance the current differentiation between those members of society who benefit from agriculture and those who do not.Furthermore, the technology itself will not be developed and used unless we address the cultural, infrastructural, and political factors which shape how it is designed and implemented.These factors include scientific paradigms, fiscal policy, international trade, domestic commodity programs, and consumer preferences.Pursuing the dialogue on sustainability is essential in order to make visible the often invisible assumptions and priorities which have governed agricultural research, policy, and business decisions leading to non-sustainable systems.Many of these assumptions and priorities also influence sustainable agriculture programs.Such an examination is critical if we are to avoid reproducing the problems engendered by conventional decision-making processes in the re- search, education, policy, and business institutions which determine agriculture.KennethDahlberg 9 notes that assumptions and biases which may occlude the development of sustain- able agriculture concepts include: separating ourselves from nature and viewing it as something which must be dominated; measuring progress in increasing applications of science and technology; emphasizing technology and formal social institutions over natural systems and less formal aspects of society; and failing to see how human societies fit into and are dependent upon larger natural systems.We would add to Dahlberg’s list the tendency to overlook the needs of human beings who are separated from us, whether it be by distance, by socioeconomic status, or by time.

These types of assumptions govern how we understand the world and have been institutionalized in educational and research pro- grams.MacRae et al.8 note that many characteristics of the research process responsible for conventional agriculture’s great productivity create obstacles to developing sustainable agriculture.Among these are over reliance on reductionism and quantification, scientists’ belief in objective “truth,” and the divorce of research from its potential social consequences.Along with Patricia Allen10 those authors also cite obstacles posed by a peer review system and publishing process which tend to reward individual “isolated” achievement while discouraging long-range interdisciplinary work and innovative ideas.This is aggravated by research funding from private sources, which encourages research on technology development rather than social analysis.The same assumptions and biases which govern research and education are also embedded in much of U.S.agricultural policy.They are expressed primarily as short-term economic considerations such as maximizing production, minimizing production costs and consumer prices, and maximizing the market share of certain agricultural commodities.These priorities have largely been those of the agricultural sector, and not necessarily those that are best for society at large.Major institutions promulgating “sustainable” agriculture often focus on the farm level rather than on the whole system.This is clear from the priorities of the U.S.Department of Agriculture’s Low Input Sustainable Agriculture program.LISA focused on “low input technologies [which] provide opportunities to reduce the farmer’s dependence on certain kinds of purchased inputs in ways that increase profits, reduce environmental hazards, and ensure a more sustainable agriculture for generations to come.”As these priorities demonstrate, agriculture is often thought of almost purely in terms of farms and farmers, a perspective traceable to the period in which most Americans were involved in farm production but which no longer reflects agriculture’s true scope.Even though the on-farm transformation of resources into food and fiber is a core process of the food and agriculture system, it is but one of many components.The system includes not only generating agricultural products, but also distributing those products and the infrastructure which affects production and distribution at regional, national, nft hydroponic system and global levels.Interactions among the larger environmental, social, and economic systems in which agriculture is situated directly influence agricultural production and distribution.The following briefly describes how these larger systems affect agriculture yet remain unaccounted for in many sustainable agriculture programs.Agricultural practices ranging from the development of irrigation projects to the use of agrichemicals have often had negative environmental impacts such as wildlife kills, pesticide residues in drinking water, soil erosion, groundwater depletion, and salinization.Substituting environmentally sound inputs for those which are damaging is an important step in addressing these problems.But ecological sustainability re- quires intensive management and substantial knowledge of ecological processes which go far beyond substitution13 and cannot be achieved merely by substituting inputs.Such substitutions need to account for their complex and long-term ecological consequences.

Otherwise they may engender secondary and perhaps more serious problems in the same way that conventional solutions frequently have been shown to do.Viewing agricultural systems as true ecosystems can serve as a model for bringing the whole-systems perspective to bear on social and economic issues as well.Instead, however, sustainability programs often take conventional approaches to solving these problems by changing the production practices which are directly at fault without addressing the total ecosystem context of either the problems or the alternative production practices which show promise as solutions.An example is the current emphasis on input substitution.Most projects funded by the USDA Low- Input Sustainable Agriculture program in its first two years, for instance, explore how inputs which cause environmental damage or incur expensive costs for the farmer can be replaced with more environmentally or economically benign inputs.In most cases single components of farming systems are being analyzed and little attempt is made to place these analyses in the context of whole agroecosystems.Agriculture both affects and is affected by the larger society.Farmer production decisions, for example, determine the diversity and quality of foods available to consumers, and farm size and technologies have been associated with the economic and social vigor of rural communities.14 At the same time, society deter- mines what is possible at the farm level.Farmers lose valuable farmland when encroaching urbanization creates zoning problems, inflates land values, and generates urban pollution which lowers crop productivity.Production decisions are heavily influenced by consumer decisions.A recent example is farmers’ voluntary discontinuation of Alar on apples.Although farmers continued to endorse the safety of Alar, they realized that this position was untenable in the face of consumer concerns.The international scope of agriculture also plays an important role.Social and economic conditions in other countries and global food supplies can greatly affect the viability of farming in local regions, as evidenced when the world grain shortages of the 1970s led to enormous expansion in U.S.grain production.When foreign demand for U.S.grain subsequently declined, many American farmers’ incomes fell, often to the point where debts incurred to expand production could not be paid, and major social and economic dislocations in the grain belt occurred.Efforts in sustainable agriculture are not unlike those of their conventional counterparts in that they tend to serve certain clientele selectively and generally do not evaluate the social consequences of the technologies that sustainable agriculture encourages.For example, organic farming strategies are often sup- ported because they are environmentally sound, and in terms of the prices organic foods command, are profitable for farmers.An unintended and unaddressed social consequence of this is that people with low incomes often cannot afford organic products and thus are denied access to food containing fewer pesticide residues.Agriculture’s reciprocal relationship with the overall economy is clear.The agricultural industry is a significant portion of the nation’s economy: in 1984 about 20 percent of U.S.jobs were in some aspect of food and fiber production, distribution, or service15 and these workers and their industries contributed 18 percent of the gross national product.