A New Practice: Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture 307Sustainable Agriculture
Productivity equity, sustainability and stability have been identified as key goals of
agricultural policy (Conway, 1994). But they are not necessarily mutually consist-
ent. Conway speaks of ‘trade-offs’ among them, especially between the economic
and ecological. This book is weighted heavily towards ecological imperatives.
Maintaining or enhancing the natural resource base is the precondition for a sus-
tainably productive agriculture.
Box 16.3 outlines the main aspects we shall examine. These aspects relate sys-
temically to one another, in that change in one aspect necessarily affects the others.
For example, the learning required for effectively practising Integrated Pest Man-
agement can apparently not be achieved by the transfer-of-technology (TOT) mode
of extension. It requires a new approach to facilitation (Matteson et al, 1992),
which in turn has important implications for institutional support. We come back
to the five dimensions in the last chapter, where we examine models of innovation
which are suitable for understanding the transformation to sustainable farming.
We shall not define sustainability solely in terms of the carrying capacity or
other ‘hard’ characteristics of an agroecosystem. We use a social science definition
(Box 16.4) that, as our cases show, proves to be eminently practical. We borrowed
the definition from the ‘Hawkesbury pioneers’, a small band of agriculturalists at
the University of Western Sydney in New South Wales (Sriskandarajah et al, 1989;
Bawden and Packam, 1991; Woodhill, 1993; Ison, 1994).
The definition in Box 16.4 incorporates elements which focus on the hard
properties of a farm or an agroecosystem. Yet we suspect that our seemingly rela-
tivist definition will irritate those who want to use scientific definitions to identify
the limits beyond which use of natural resources should not go (Korthals, 1994).
Box 16.3 Five interlocking dimensions of the transformation to sustainable
farming- agricultural practices, both at the farm and higher system levels;
- learning those practices;
- facilitating that learning;
- institutional frameworks that support such facilitation, comprising markets, sci-
ence, extension, networks of innovation etc.; - conducive policy frameworks, including regulations, subsidies etc.; and espe-
cially: - the management of change from conventional to sustainable agriculture along
each of the dimensions.