Building Sustainable Agriculture

Abstract

Sustainable agriculture requires the balancing of a variety of goals. This means that often no single goal can be maximized, since such optimization might totally preclude the achievement of one of the other goals of sustainability. For this reason, transdisciplinary teams containing advocates of the various goals, with ability to negotiate priorities, provide an important input into research and extension toward a sustainable agriculture. Further, farmer membership on these teams is particularly crucial, because a sustainable agriculture means that the farmer shifts from a user of technology to a producer of technology and a monitor of its impacts. A major impediment to the development of transdisciplinary approaches is the lack of good indicators of sustainability. In part this is due to the ease of use of traditional measures of production and profit. Not only do these yield single, summary measures; they have relatively short term manifestations. Indicators of the impact of agricultural practices on sustainabiliiy are more diffuse and more long term. Systematic efforts are needed to develop such measures. Farming systems research and extension (FSR/E) has traditionally involved multidisciplinary teams, which have included farmer participation. However, both the composition and process of FSR/E must be altered to include the multidimensions of sustainable agriculture. Such adaptations are possible in all phascs of FSR/E: from diagnosis, to design, to on-farm trials, to monitoring and evaluation, and finally extension.