Incorporating health and ecologic costs into agricultural production.

McWilliams explored the injustices of migratory farm labor in California. Yet his description of the rural California landscape at that time captures the essential characteristics of the predominant form of agricultural production in the United States today: Travelers along the highways pass through orchards that seem literally mea-sureless and gaze upon vast tracts of farm land stretching away on either side of the road to the distant foothills.… Where are the farms? Where are the farm-houses?… Here a new type of agriculture has been created:… farming has been replaced by industrialized agriculture, the farm by the farm factory (1). Large-scale, resource-intensive enterprises, often based on a single crop, have come to represent the norm in modern farming. Such farms tend toward intensification (more production per unit area), reduction in biodiversity, dependence on inputs not found locally (e.g., fertilizers and pesticides), and production of wastes that cannot be absorbed easily by the local ecosystem or community. Such practices have their counterparts in meat production in the form of confined animal feeding operations and the routine use of antibiotics. Horrigan and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future refer to this type of production as " industrial agriculture " and contrast it with sustainable agriculture (2). They argue that industrial agriculture creates a wide range of negative health and ecologic consequences and that an agricultural production model based on the concept of sustainability provides a long-term alternative to current practices. This debate is a complex one, touching on social, economic, and ethical issues. A major criticism of conventional practices is that they fail to incorporate the true costs of production, treating human health and ecologic impacts as " external-ities " within current economic models. This approach carries with it an implicit notion that producers are not responsible for such impacts and that entities such as government agencies will take on this burden. Such a view is fundamentally at odds with a public health model that attempts to incorporate the prevention of injury and illness into production processes. There is clearly a need to develop measures of sustainability that incorporate the so-called externalities of health and ecologic impacts, and to conduct comparisons across agricultural systems. A significant step in this direction was reported recently by researchers at Washington State University (3) who evaluated the sustainability of conventional, organic, and integrated (mixed organic–conventional) apple production. In this study, Reganold et …