What is Sustainable Agriculture?

Abstract

To overcome the ambiguity of the concept of sustainable agriculture in surveys of personal definitions of this phenomenon, a semi-structured approach allowing respondents to provide their own definitions was employed. Agricultural faculty at a land-grant institution and a statewide sample of farmers were given a list of 14 possible components in mail questionnaires and asked to rate each in terms of its necessity for achieving sustainable agriculture, as well as to add any additional components they felt were important. This paper compares the faculty's and farmers' responses to each component, highlighting points of agreement and disagreement between the samples. It then analyzes their responses to determine the appropriateness of combining the items into an overall "Definition of Sustainable Agriculture Scale," as well as the degree to which the items form distinct "dimensions" of sustainability. Sources of variation in both the overall scale and its three dimensions (ecological, socioeconomic, and ethical sustainability) are then examined for both samples, but with limited success. The largest source of variation is academic discipline, as faculty in production-oriented disciplines tend to hold narrower definitions of sustainability than do faculty in less production-oriented disciplines.