NRC Report Tackles Sustainability in the 21st Century
The National Research Council (NRC) recently issued a report titled Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century, which reviews farming practices, technologies and management systems that seek to promote environmental, social and economic sustainability.
According to NRC, “the scale, organization, enterprise diversity, and forms of market integration associated with individual farms provide unique opportunities or barriers to improving their ability to contribute to global or local food production, ecosystem integrity, economic viability, and social well-being.”
The report apparently evaluates agricultural systems on whether they are sufficiently productive, robust and efficient in their efforts to meet these four goals. It also proposes “two parallel and overlapping efforts to ensure continuous improvement in the sustainability performance of U.S. agriculture: incremental and transformative.” The former approach “would be directed at improving the sustainability of all farms, irrespective of size or farming system type,” while the latter “would apply a systems perspective to agricultural research to identify and understand the significance of the linkages between farming components and how their interconnectedness and interactions with the environment make systems robust and resilient over time.”
In making these recommendations, however, the report emphasizes that farmers must balance productivity and cost with other mitigating factors, such as public concern over air and water pollution, animal welfare and food safety. The NRC Committee on Twenty-First Century Systems Agriculture thus noted that achieving sustainability will require “long-term research, education, outreach, and experimentation by the public and private sectors in partnership with farmers.” As committee chair Julia Kornegay was quoted as saying, “Many modern agricultural practices have unintended negative consequences, such as decreased water and air quality, and farmers have to consider these consequences while trying to increase production. If farmers are going to meet future demands, the U.S. agricultural system has to evolve to become sustainable and think broadly—past the bottom line of producing the most possible.” See NRC Press Release, June 29, 2010.
