Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century

enough food, feed, and fi ber to meet increasing demand in conditions of changing climate and scarce natural resources. Innovative policies and new farming approaches based on a strong scientifi c foundation are needed to tackle the challenge of increasing production while also meeting environmental, economic, and social goals. This report, produced with the support of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, reviews progress and identifi es future actions that can be taken to improve agricultural sustainability. It also explores how lessons learned in U.S. agriculture could be relevant to agriculture in different regions and settings, specifi cally in sub-Saharan Africa. It provides an update to the 1989 National Research Council report Alternative Agriculture, M odern agriculture has had an impressive history of productivity that has resulted in relatively affordable food, feed, and fi ber for domestic purposes, accompanied by substantial growth in agricultural exports. Farm output in 2008 was 158 percent higher than it was in 1948, and farmers today are producing more food with less energy per unit output than ever before. Despite these advances, much of the recent progress in agriculture has been primarily on satisfying food, feed, and fi ber needs, and secondarily on goals such as enhancing environmental quality or increasing the number of farming jobs. For example, the fertilizers and pesticides used to boost crop growth have infi ltrated and polluted rivers and waterways. With global populations rising rapidly, U.S. agriculture faces the challenge of producing U.S. farmers are under pressure to satisfy multiple, often competing demands, such as to produce more crops, pollute less, fulfi ll consumer preferences, pay fair wages, and make a living—all with increasingly scarce natural resources such as land and water. To evolve farming systems that meet all of these demands, national agricultural policy, research programs, and food markets will need to shift away from emphasizing low costs and high production exclusively and develop a more holistic perspective of how farms provide benefi ts to society. This report recommends reaching this goal through two parallel efforts: an incre-mental approach, in which ongoing endeavors to develop sustainable agricultural techniques are expanded; and a transformative approach, in which multiple research areas are brought together to design farming systems that balance the competing demands from the outset.