Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
farming systems in light of agroecological principles. The committee
identified the two greatest obstacles as the lack of research and the
federal farm subsidies that penalized growers for experimenting with
alternatives to monocrop production.
Alternative Agriculture
stimulated
considerable controversy, in part because its methodology departed from
the typical reductionistic approach and in part because it focused scien-
tific attention on agriculture's threats to its own resource base. Its publi-
cation was a turning point in the history of American agricultural
science. For the first time, the nation's highest scientific research author-
ity accorded a measure of legitimacy to alternative perspectives within
agricultural science.
Alternative Agriculture
was published in the year of
the
Exxon Valdez
oil spill and the Alar pesticide scare. Although its crit-
icism of dominant agricultural science was only implicit, many LGU
scientists felt attacked yet again, but others responded with cautious
curiosity.
54
The same year
Alternative Agriculture
was published (1989), the NRC
commissioned a new committee to study the science, technical tools, and
policies needed to protect soil and water quality. Four years later,
Soil
and Water Quality: An Agenda for Agriculture
called for a systems
approach to prevent pollution while protecting farming productivity.
55
It
argued:
. . . integrated farming system plans should become the basis of federal, state, and
local soil and water quality programs. . . . Inherent links exist among soil qual-
ity conservation, improvements in input use efficiency, increases in resistance to
erosion and runoff, and the wider use of buffer zones. These links become appar-
ent only if investigators take a systems-level approach to analyzing agricultural
production systems. The focus of such an analysis is the farming system, which
comprises the pattern and sequence of crops in space and time, the management
decisions regarding the inputs and production practices uses, the management
skills, education and objectives of the producer, the quality of the soil and water,
and the nature of the landscape and ecosystem with which agricultural produc-
tion occurs.
56
This report became the most influential agricultural environmental
resource protection agenda during the 1990s. It did not explicitly define
“integrated farming system,” admitting that variability in cropping sys-
tems, ecosystems, and regional contexts made a singular definition
impossible. Also left unaddressed were questions of extension program
and practice. It did not point to any working models.
