re: Assessing Sustainable Agriculture

To: msa95ac@wye.ac.uk
Subject: re: Assessing Sustainable Agriculture
From: WLockeretz@infonet.tufts.edu
Date: Wed, 29 May 96 10:42:51 EDT
Cc: SANET-MG@amani.ces.ncsu.edu

Alexia Coke asked about projects using indexes of agricultural 
sustainability, and about differences between organic and sustainable 
agriculture. One very recent effort that deals with both issues is by Donald 
Taylor and colleagues at South Dakota State University. Their paper 
"Comparison of organic and sustainable fed cattle production: A South Dakota 
case study" will be appearing in the Vol. 11, No. 1 of American Journal of 
Alternative Agriculture, which is in press and will be out very soon.

That work adapts an earlier approach to developing an index of sustainability 
reported in the paper "Creating a farmer sustainability index: A Malaysian 
case study" (D.C. Taylor et al., Amer. J. Alt. Agric. 8(4):175-184; 1993).

Warning: ANY attempt to create an index of agricultural sustainability, no 
matter how carefully thought through, is sure to draw criticism from someone, 
on the grounds that "You didn't include such-and-such," or "You shouldn't 
have include this-or-that." Also, certain persons question whether one should 
even try to develop an index of sustainability, arguing that it hardly seems 
appropriate to reduce to a single number a concept that's supposed to 
exorcise the demon of reductionism, and instead is said to be about 
complexity, systems-level integration, transdisciplinary phenomena, holism, 
multiple goals, diverse kinds of knowledge, etc., etc., etc. They have a 
point.

William Lockeretz
Tufts University