A three step framework for agricultural change 

Using international examples  Jules Pretty outlines the options available to help farmers move towards sustainable agriculture. Dramatic changes which enhance the environment can be achieved by taking many small steps. Nevertheless we should not be complacent, as there is much still to be done to encourage the redesign of farming economies.

Defining sustainability
Since the Brundtland Commission helped to put ‘sustainable development’ on the map in the mid-1980s, close to 100 definitions of ‘sustainability’ have been published. Each emphasises different values, priorities and practices. Clearly no reasonable person is opposed to the idea. But what does it mean?
    To some it implies the capacity of something to continue unchanged for a long time. To others, it implies not damaging natural resources. To others still, it is just accounting for the environment whilst continuing on a business-as-usual track.
    Does any of this help in the context of farming? We all know sustainability represents something good, but what exactly? And, more importantly, has the notion of ‘sustainable agriculture’ contributed to better farm practices, or is the term too easily hijacked?
    A vigorous debate has emerged in Britain around these issues (see PN30 and 31).

Claims, counter-claims and contrasting terminologies
During the past 50 years, agricultural policies world-wide have been remarkably good at emphasising external inputs as the sole means to increase food production. This has produced dramatic growth in consumption of pesticides, inorganic fertiliser, animal feed and so on.
    These external inputs have, however, substituted for natural control processes and resources, rendering them more vulnerable. Pesticides have replaced biological, cultural and mechanical methods for controlling pests, weeds and diseases; inorganic fertilisers have substituted for livestock manures, composts and nitrogen-fixing crops; and fossil fuels have substituted for locally-generated energy sources. What were once valued local resources have often now become waste products.
    Despite this, a wide range of more sustainable forms of agriculture are emerging and spreading. There are many terms including: organic, sustainable, alternative, regenerative, low-external input, balanced-inputs, precision farming, targeted inputs, ‘wise-use’ of inputs, resource-conserving, biological, natural, eco-agriculture, agro-ecological, biodynamic and permaculture. Some of these have precisely-defined and broadly-agreed standards: others do not. This is not a problem if we accept that these are all forms of more sustainable agriculture. Does it matter if we do not know how much more?
    Unfortunately several lobbies take the stance that ‘their’ type is the only form of sustainable agriculture. Some argue, for example, that precision farming (involving yield mapping and targeted use of inputs) is sustainable, as it is efficient and productive1,2,3. Some even argue that high-input farming is sustainable, as its very high productivity protects uncultivated forests and wildernesses from coming under the plough4.
    Over the last two years ICM (integrated crop management) has emerged as a popular moniker in British farming. Initiatives to promote its uptake include LEAF, LIFE, LINK, TIBRE. This is another contested concept (see Redman5, Farmer6, Wise7 and Leake8). Some believe it offers great promise—others say that ICM represents an attempt by large farmers, supermarkets and chemical companies to claim the environmental high-ground whilst not significantly changing farming practices.

The three steps of sustainability
One way of reconciling these deep differences is to see sustainable agriculture as a series of steps rather than a sudden and one-off shift in practices and values. Not all farmers are able or willing to take such a leap. But everyone can make a small step and added together these can bring about big change.
    We have conceived of four steps in this process (adapted from Macrae et al9). Step 0 is conventional modern farming. The other three incorporate changes in economic and environmental efficiency; changes in the integration of regenerative technologies; and redesign with communities.

Step 0: Conventional modern farming
This comprises farming with high-yielding crops or livestock breeds, supplemented with pesticides, inorganic fertilisers, machinery and irrigation, with information coming from off-farm and outside community (from extensionists, private suppliers of inputs, researchers).
    The basic approach is to emphasise external solutions and technologies to overcome internal productivity constraints; farming systems are simplified to maximise production; farmers are expected to adapt to the technologies; economic efficiency is improved by cutting labour costs; and natural resources are said to be conserved as high-output farming decreases the need to cultivate more land.

But: the leakage of external inputs off the farm damages both natural resources (water, air, soil, plants and wildlife) and human health; the simplification of farming systems results in loss of off-farm biodiversity and simplified landscapes; poorer farmers are unable to adopt whole (and costly) external packages; and there is increased social and cultural impoverishment.

Step 1: Improved economic and environmental efficiency
This step comprises the adoption of information-intensive technologies and practices for precision farming. It includes targeted inputs, patch spraying, deep placement and slow release fertilisers, global positioning systems and satellite mapping, low-volume and minimal dose pesticides, soil testing, weed maps, no-till or non-inversion farming, mechanical and weed harrowing, and pest and disease resistant crops. Efficiency is increased as inputs are not wasted and no longer lost to the environment.

But: the goals of farming remain mainly the same, and so existing values and rights are not fundamentally challenged.

Step 2: Integration with regenerative technologies
This step incorporates regenerative technologies and drops some conventional ones. It includes the use of alternative pesticides (biological, bacterial and viral); habitat manipulation to encourage predators; natural enemy release; the integration of animals (sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, fish, bees) into arable systems; the incorporation of crops and trees that fix nitrogen (legumes and clovers, green manures, cover crops); and emphasis on technologies that conserve and collect soil and water.
    These regenerative technologies make the best use of all locally-available biological and human resources, and so there is more reliance on management skills and knowledge. Ecological and landscape diversity increases.

But: communities remain relatively uninvolved in farming matters, and the capacity of farmers is not necessarily enhanced to promote local adaptation of technologies.

Step 3: Redesign with communities
This step has agriculture as a central part of community activities, so sustainability becomes an emergent property of communities, catchments, or whole landscapes. Attitudes and values are now completely different as new philosophies and participatory practices emerge; resource-conserving technologies are locally-specific and varied by farmers; local people have greater self-reliance and cohesion; local groups and institutions are strengthened for natural resource management and financial resource management; external institutions are reformed as professionals work as facilitators and enablers of local change; and agriculture as a whole is structured to emphasise local economic regeneration.

But: this will need supportive policies if redesign is to spread over whole nations.

Evidence of change on farms
Farmers are already making the transition through these three steps of sustainability in many parts of the world. And the changes are bringing both environmental and economic benefits for farmers, communities and nations.
    Good evidence of redesign comes from countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America10,11, where the concern is to increase food production in the areas where farming has been largely untouched by the modern packages of externally-supplied technologies (see box). In these lands, farming communities adopting regenerative technologies have substantially improved agricultural yields, often using only few or no external inputs. Many of these successes are community-based activities that have meant a complete redesign of farming and other economic activities at local level.
    In industrialised countries, farmers are increasingly showing that they can cut input use dramatically whilst not losing out on profitability—as the evidence from Germany and the US illustrates (see box).
    In the UK, in addition to the organic sector, an increasing number of research programmes, combined with some farmer exeprience, indicates that a transition towards sustainable agriculture can result in substantial cuts in inputs, with the maintenance, or even improvement, of gross margins.  Recent examples include:

• some 20,000 ha of arable land were mapped with GPS and computer-aided technologies last year leading to reduced use of inputs;

• five years of research on the LIFE project farms shows that though low-input systems yield 11-18% less for cereals, and use 13-19% less energy, 36% less nitrogen, and 20-80% less insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, the gross margins vary from 3% less to 7% more than conventional margins12,13;

• research by the Scottish Agricultural College shows that the profitability of many crops can be maintained with 75% reductions in the use of herbicides and fungicides;

• research quoted by Massey Ferguson, a private company promoting precision technologies, shows that computer‑aided farming can reduce nitrogen applications by 25-45%14;

• research at Rothamsted shows that herbicide use can be cut by 30% when weeds are accurately mapped and patch spraying technology used15;

• LINK integrated farming systems research conduced on 6 sites across the country shows that crop yields and gross margins can be maintained with 15% less nitrogen and 35-40% less use of pesticides16;

• an economic assessment of ICM on the 20 LEAF demonstration farms has shown that they perform comparably or even better than conventional farms.

Put this together with the considerable body of research and practice on organic farming, and we have indications of a wide range of viable alternatives for existing conventional farmers.
    But this emerging empirical evidence is still contested. In the USA, some 82% of conventional US farmers believe that low input agriculture will always be low output17. Influential politicians continue to reinforce these beliefs. In 1991, the US Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, said: we can go back to organic agriculture in this country if we must—we once farmed that way 75 years ago. However, before we move in that direction, someone must decide which 50 million of our people will starve. We simply cannot feed, even at subsistence levels, our 250 million Americans without a large production input of chemicals, antibiotics and growth hormones.
    And this year, the Under-Secretary for Agriculture, Eugene Moos, said: The prospective increase in world population will double food aid needs in the next decade... and it will be necessary for agricultural producing nations to use biotechnology and hormones to meet growing demand.

Encouraging more change with participatory learning
How can more farmers be encouraged to begin the transition through the three steps of sustainability?
    The first thing to note is that sustainable agriculture should not prescribe a concretely defined set of technologies, practices or policies. This would only serve to restrict the future options of farmers. As economic, ecological and social conditions change, so must farmers and communities be encouraged and allowed to change and adapt too. Sustainable agriculture is, therefore, not a simple model or package to be imposed. It is more a process for learning.
    This is backed up by recent research on 550 farmers in the Netherlands. Once farmers begin to make the change, that is they take one small step, they tend to keep going18. As farmers use new, more environmentally-sensitive technologies, so this appears to provoke more thinking about the environment. This in turn leads to more curiosity about what more can be done. Further changes in behaviour provoke further changes in values, and further steps are taken. As Somers put it: Farmers find themselves developing knowledge and skills, changing their goals and experiencing risks differently... It is better not to speak of ‘adoption of an innovation’, but of a gradual learning process with shifting goals and perceptions.
    But not all farmers do make the transition. Some adopt the economically and environmentally efficient stance using precision farming, and then go no further.
    Although we only partially know which social factors are crucial to fostering change, it is clear that the process by which farmers learn about technology alternatives is one. If farmers are forced or coerced they may adopt new practices, but will only continue if their incomes are dependent on the technology.
    On the other hand a participatory process which enhances farmers’ capacity to learn about their farm and its resources lays the foundations for redesign. There are many good examples of the effectiveness of this participatory learning from countries of the Third World19. A notable case from the OECD context comes from south Queensland, Australia, where extensionists from the Department of Primary Industry, using simple learning tools that enabled farmers to investigate the impact of rainfall on their soil, have encouraged more than 80% of farmers to adopt conservation technologies. Many of these have gone on to develop and adopt new and different technologies for their own farms20.

Policies and consumers 
Most successes, though, are still localised: they are simply islands of success. This is partly because favourable policy environments are missing. Most policies still actively encourage farming that is dependent on external inputs and technologies, so discriminating against sustainability. It is these policy frameworks that are one of the principal barriers to the spread of a more sustainable agriculture. What is needed is not just better policies, but also new policy processes that could bring together groups with currently very different interests.
    There are important roles for consumers. There are now a growing number of box schemes (with consumers guaranteeing to buy of an agreed quality from particular farmers) and community-supported agricultural activities available, with consumers able to buy food of a known and reliable quality. But despite these opportunities, the great majority of consumers still buy their food from large retailers.
    The good news is that some supermarkets are beginning to make changes ahead of legislation. Some are now encouraging all their growers to use ICM technologies, not in order to acquire a kite mark that leads to increased food prices. As Alastair Leake (1996) put it: the economic imperative will be the difference between selling and not selling your production rather than any niche market ‘green’ premiums21. This is surely good for consumers and for farmers, as it widens choices and increases the number of farmers engaged in more sustainable practices. It does not, however, guarantee the transition towards redesign.
    One option, already happening in the Netherlands, is for agricultural products to be graded red, silver or gold in supermarkets according to the type of farming system that produced them. Red is for ‘conventional’ farming (Step 0); silver denotes ‘integrated farming’ (Step 1); and gold means organic or biodynamic (Steps 2-3). This system gradually raises standards without forcing farmers to change overnight—but it does rely on consumers being willing and able to pay premiums for the 'better quality' food.
    Clearly much is now being done to support the transition to more sustainable forms of agriculture. Farmers world-wide are taking small steps. However, we should not be complacent. There is much still to be done to encourage the more fundamental changes implied by the notion of redesign of farming and rural economies.

References
1.Precision Farming, Massey Ferguson, Coventry 1995.
2. DowElanco, What makes agriculture sustainable The Bottom Line, Indianapolis, 1994, US.
3. JSWC, Sustainable agriculture: perspectives from industry, Journal of Soil and Water Conservation (Jan-Feb), 199, pp 31-33.
4. Avery D., Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic, the Hudson Institute, Indianapolis, 1995, US.
5. Redman M.A response on integrated crop management, PN 30, 1995, p13.
6.Farmer P., Debate about LIFE and low input farming, PN30, 1995, p12.
7. Wise C., Defending ICM-NFU response, PN31, 1196, p16-17.
8. Leake A., Setting new standards, PN31 1996, p17.
9.Macrae R.J, Henning J. and Hill S.B., Strategies to overcome barriers to the development of sustainable agriculture in Canada: the role of agribusiness, Journal of Agriculture and Environmental Ethics 1993, 21-51.
10. Pretty J.N., Regenerating Agriculture: Policies and Practice for Sustainability and Self-Reliance, Earthscan Publications, London and National Academy Press, Washington DC, 1995.
11. Hinchcliffe F., Thompson J. and Pretty J.N., Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in East and Southern Africa, A report for the Committee on Food Security in East and South Africa, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Stockholm, IIED, London, 1996.
12. Jordan V.W.L and Hutcheon J.A., Economic viability of less-intensive farming systems designed to meet current and future policy requirements: 5 year summary of the LIFE project, Aspects of Applied Biology 40, 1994, pp61-68.
13. Donaldson J.V.G, Hutcheon J.A., Jordan V.W.L., Evaluation of energy usage for machinery operations in the development of more environmentally benign farming systems, Aspects of Applied Biology 40, 1994, pp87-91.
14.Op. cit. 1.
15. Rew L.J. and Cussans G.W., Patch ecology and dynamic-how much do we know, In: Proceedings of the Brighton Crop Protection Conference, Vol. 3, 1995, pp1059-1068.
16.Ogilvy S., Turley D.B., Cook S.K., Fisher N.M., Holland J., Prew R.D., and Spink J., LINK integrated farming systems: a considered approach to crop protection, BCPC/SFS Symposium Proceedings No 63, 11-14 Sept, Integrated Crop Protection: Towards Sustainability?, 1995.
17. Hewitt T.I. and Smith K.R., Intensive Agriculture and |Environmental Quality: Examining the Newest Agricultural Myth, Henry Walllace Institute for Alternative Agriculture, Greenbelt MD 1995.
18.Somers B., Learning about sustainable agriculture: the case of Dutch arable farmers, In Roling N G and Wagemakers M A (eds), 1996, Sustainable Agriculture: Participatory Learning and Action, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (in press), 1996.
19. Op. cit. 10.
20. Hamilton N.A., Learning to Learn with farmers, PhD thesis, Wageningen Agriculture University, Wageningen, Netherlands, 1995.
21. Op. cit.8.
22. Op. cit. 10, 11, 17.

Jules N Pretty is Director of the Sustainable Agriculture Programme at the International Institute for Environment and Development, 3 Endsleigh Street, London, WC1H 0DD, UK.

[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 32, June 1996, pages 6-8]