Sustainable Agriculture

Sustainable agriculture is one that produces abundant food without depleting the earth’s resources or polluting its environment. It is agriculture that follows the principles of nature to develop systems for raising crops and livestock that are, like nature, self-sus­taining. Sustainable agriculture is also the agriculture of social values, one whose suc­cess is indistinguishable from vibrant rural communities, rich lives for families on the farms, and wholesome food for everyone.

Conventional 20th-Century agriculture took industrial production as its model, and verti­cally-integrated agri-business was the result. The industrial approach, coupled with sub­stantial government subsidies, made food abundant and cheap. But farms are biological systems, not mechani­cal ones, and they exist in a social context in ways that manufacturing plants do not. Through its emphasis on high production, the industrial model has degraded soil and water, reduced the biodiversity that is a key element to food security, increased our dependence on imported oil, and driven more and more acres into the hands of fewer and fewer “farmers,” crippling rural communities.

In recent decades, sustainable farmers and researchers around the world have responded to the extractive industrial model with ecol­ogy-based approaches, variously called natu­ral, organic, low-input, alternative, regenera­tive, holistic, Biodynamic, biointensive, and biological farming systems. All of them, rep­resenting thousands of farms, have contrib­uted to our understanding of what sustain­able systems are, and each of them shares a vision of “farming with nature,” an agro-ecology that promotes biodiversity, recycles plant nutrients, protects soil from erosion, conserves and protects water, uses mini­mum tillage, and integrates crop and live­stock enterprises on the farm.

But no matter how elegant the system or how accomplished the farmer, no agriculture is sustainable if it’s not also profitable, able to provide a healthy family income and a good quality of life. Sustainable practices lend themselves to smaller, family-scale farms. These farms, in turn, tend to find their best niches in local markets, within local food sys­tems, often selling directly to consumers. As alternatives to industrial agriculture evolve, so must their markets and the farmers who serve them. Creating and serving new mar­kets remains one of the key challenges for sustainable agriculture.

Sustainable Energy in Agriculture

In the coming decades the world faces the challenge to make a transition to sustainable energy use patterns in order to save fossil fuels for future generations and to reduce the negative impacts of burning fossil fuels on the environment. The issue of climate change requires substantial reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases in the world.

The Kyoto Protocol, recently adopted in the context of the Climate Change Convention, calls for a decrease in emissions by improving energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources.
Agriculture plays a key role in the process of transition towards more sustainable energy use patterns. First, the agricultural sector is itself a user of energy, not only in primary production of commodities, but also in food processing and distribution of agricultural products. Second, the agricultural sector substantially contributes to energy supply, in particular through the production of biomass, including fire wood, agricultural byproducts, animal waste, charcoal, other derived fuels and, increasingly through production of energy crops. The share of biomass in energy consumption depends on economic structure, the level of income, the availability of land and other energy sources. Most of this consumption is in the form of low efficiency conversion systems with adverse effects on human health and the environment. In many rural areas in developing countries, bioenergy production is already an important agricultural activity. Traditional use of biomass may lead to deforestation and excessive use of natural resources. On the other hand, technological progress is expected to bring more efficient biomass energy production systems and enables new applications such as the production of energy from waste and by products of agriculture. The Kyoto Protocol and its flexible mechanisms, i.e. the Clean.

Development Mechanism and Joint Implementation have renewed the interest in the role of agriculture in CO2 mitigation. Storage of carbon in forests and the use of biofuel crops may reduce net emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and mitigate global warming.
However, the storage capacity is small compared to the tremendous quantities of CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. Moreover, reforestation requires land with alternative uses in e.g. food production, implying that it may adversely affect world food supply. Costs of carbon sequestration differ widely across the world, from a few dollars per ton in developing countries, to several hundreds of dollars per ton in developed countries.