Encyclopedia of Environmental History
Sustainable Agriculture
As Americans embraced the environmental ideal in the late 1960s and early 1970s, proponents of an ecologically oriented agriculture argued that farmers needed to reduce their dependence upon artificial chemicals and embrace a new ethic of stewardship to ensure the survival of humanity. Sustainable agriculture had several historical antecedents related to organic farming and holistic thinking, and was eventually embraced the agricultural research establishment, some farmers, and consumers concerned with the health of rural America and the health of the food supply.
Sustainable agriculture, as the term implies, is an agricultural system designed for ecological and economic permanence. After World War II American farms produced a bountiful harvest with the wide scale adoption of “green revolution” science and technology, including mechanization, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, nitrate-based fertilizers, as well as biotechnology. Though farms became more productive, the economic and ecological costs of modern agriculture became increasingly evident to many observers by the 1960s and 1970s. Rachel Carson’s noted 1962 book Silent Spring was one of many works attacking the unchecked use of chemicals; while other scholars and writers such as Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson began to note the disappearance of family farms along with their cries for an agricultural system based on the “model of nature.”
Many definitions of sustainable agriculture emerged as the term became popularized, and other terms such as agroecology, permaculture, and organic or holistic farming helped define the movement as a scientific and social concept. Based on decades-old notions of ecology, conservation, and planned land use, sustainable agriculture also appealed to back-to-the-land advocates and to consumers concerned over food safety and ethical stewardship. Advocates of sustainable agriculture urged farmers to wean themselves off of expensive and environmentally harmful chemicals, while railing against the USDA, agricultural corporations, and the land grant colleges for promoting an agricultural system that displaced farmers from the land and spoiled the environment.
Proponents of sustainable agriculture promoted the use of “natural” fertilizers, such as compost and green manure crops, as well as integrated pest management, diversification of crop types away from monocultures, and localized and targeting marketing of farm products to eliminate “middlemen” and create new markets for crops and animal products produced in a “sustainable” fashion that promotes a healthy ecology and a stronger farm economy for family sized farm operations. Some exponents of sustainable agriculture even argued for a return to farm grown animals to replace tractors and other machines using combustion engines on the farm.
In the 1980s the agricultural establishment—land grant colleges, the USDA and experiment station network, and agricultural corporations—began to embrace the sustainable agriculture movement as they devoted more resources and research to sustainable agriculture. Sustainable agriculture is an economic, social, and scientific concept. Often the promises of the “movement” were difficult to achieve in a highly technical and competitive global agricultural system wherein artificial “inputs” and economy of scale still reigns supreme. Nonetheless, the sustainability concept has been engrained within new generations of Americans, and the often vocal and eloquent champions of sustainable agriculture have made Americans more aware of the delicate relations between the food supply and the environment. Organic farming has become a multi-billion dollar industry, and farmers markets and food marketed as “ethically grown” has increased exponentially in recent years.
Altieri, Miguel. Agroecology: The Scientific Basis for Alternative Agriculture. Berkeley:
University of California, 1983.
Beeman, Randal and Pritchard, James. A Green and Permanent Land : Ecology and
Agriculture in the Twentieth Century. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press
2001.
Belasco, Warren. Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food
Industry. New York: Pantheon, 1989.
Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1977.
Jackson, Wes. New Roots for American Agriculture. San Francisco: Friends of the
Earth, 1980.
Randal Beeman
Bakersfield College