Sustainable Agriculture

Sustainable Agriculture: The term means something different to every farmer, agricultural community member, advocate, policy maker, government agency staff, and detractor.

At the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station (NJAES), we try less to define sustainability as a term, and focus more on the practices farmers can use to keep them on a path of sustainable profitability, sustainable use of natural and management resources, and sustainable coexistence with non-farmers in a densely populated urban state.

A sustainable agriculture results in New Jersey farming systems that endure over long periods of time. Tough. Flexible. Durable against the risks common to all farming; production risk, marketing risk, financial risk, legal risk, and human resources risk.

In New Jersey, the threats to sustained farming profitability and economic use of natural resources have changed. Traditional risks like weather, markets, and finance (interest rates or debt) remain with farmers. But, New Jersey farmers have newer risks to production like intolerable levels of deer damage to crops in suburbanizing areas. They have newer threats to viability in asset cost (rapidly rising suburban land values) and input cost (supplies farmers buy at retail) prices rising faster than inflation while the prices farmers receive stagnate. This cost/price squeeze generates returns too low for many farm families, at the same time that contentious New Jersey policy issues like downzoning threaten farmers' most valuable resource asset: land. Sustainable agriculture recognizes that in New Jersey, farmers do not stand alone. New Jersey farmers often experience "border dispute" property rights problems requiring mutual support between farmers and their neighbors.

Farmers are always searching for ways to maintain and improve the environmental health of their natural resources like their land. At the same time, farmers simultaneously are driven to use new technologies that minimize input costs, increase crop product quality and marketability, and lead to a satisfying quality of farm family life.

Sustainable agriculture often defies definition precisely because it is embraced with varying expectations by farmers, environmentalists, and others. Sustainable agriculture does not advocate one method of production over another. In fact, sustainable agriculture demands NJAES at New Jersey's land-grant university respects the aspirations and goals of all individuals involved in agriculture.