Excerpt
PEOPLE hear terms like low-input, reduced-input, sustainable, organic, biological, regenerative, and alternative agriculture. They wonder if these are all the same thing. They don't know what path the search for sustainability should take, and how they will know when they get there. Many look in vain for a single definition to guide them.
Meanwhile, farmers are trying different approaches, unworried about how to define them. Several who described their farming operations at a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) hosted conference on low-input agriculture ended their remarks by saying, “I don't know if what I'm doing is low-input sustainable agriculture or not.”
There are reasons why we lack a single, agreed-upon definition of what the search is all about. First, low-input sustainable agriculture is a way of thinking or a philosophy. It is not a farming practice or a method-which is usually easier to define. In fact, to try to force a specific definition of low-input, sustainable agriculture would be a mistake because it is a way of thinking.
Second, low-input sustainable agriculture has evolved mainly as a reaction to the adverse environmental …
Footnotes
Neill Schaller is director of the Low-Input Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program with the Cooperative State Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C. 20250-2200. This article is adopted from Schaller's presentation at the conference, “The Promise of Low-Input Agriculture: A Search for Sustainability and Profitability.”.
- Copyright 1990 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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