Shaping a Sustainable Agriculture

David  Granatstein

doi:10.7273/000002758

Agriculture today, full of promise and problems, is judged "good" or "bad" by various individuals or groups according to their particular perspective. Our inexpensive food is good for consumers, but typically bad for farmers. We have fewer people producing food-good for statistics on "efficiency", but a problem for rural communities. Pesticides make our food safe from many microbial contaminants and free of blemishes, but health concerns about pesticide residues are growing and unanswered. Crop yields keep reaching new records, but dependence on non-renewable inputs is also increasing. Despite 50 years of soil conservation efforts, soil erosion continues to seriously rob our land heritage, and contamination threatens the integrity of our water resource. These issues account for the growing interest in "sustainable agriculture", the term being popularized to help us reexamine how our food is produced. In North America, we are fortunate to have a stable and abundant food supply which allows us to look critically at the consequences of that abundance. Agriculture in developed countries has evolved at a rapid pace during this past century, in large part due to the contributions of science and technology. Yet there is ample evidence that this evolution has increasingly departed from sound ecological, economic, and social principles. Agricultural solutions have become more and more narrow, often ignoring the broader systems within which farming occurs and the undesirable impacts that result. As agriculture faces ever more complex challenges, here and abroad, we must recognize the relationship of agriculture to the larger systems. We are now bumping into ecological limits that do not allow us the luxury of waiting for today's system to slowly shift to a more holistic approach. Thus, agriculture needs fundamental changes soon to move us rapidly towards sustainability. Many of our

Shaping a Sustainable Agriculture

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