Sustainable Agriculture: Its Indicators and Effects on Agriculture

Sustainable agriculture is the successful management of resources for agriculture to satisfy changing human needs, while maintaining or enhancing the standard of the environment and conserving natural resources. It was practiced for nearly 6000 years of the preindustrial era, from 8000 to 2000 BC, without much disruption of nature. Sustainability is a perpetual issue in time scale with associated dynamism in resource base and outputs in terms of variety and quantity. Sacrificing agriculture sustainability will pose grave threat to the basic food security in agriculturally dependent countries. The ecological aspect of the negative effects is immeasurable. Agriculture is no longer location specific in terms of production as well as product outreach due to the technological advancements in production, transport, communication, supply chain and networking to cater to the demands of global citizens. The rate of changes expected and demanded from agriculture is acute and this precisely puts pressure on the long-term perspective of sustainability, that is directly related to the maintenance of support systems i.e., natural resource base. Assessment of sustainability should be done by including many indicators of physical, economical, demographic, ecological that has interrelationships in short term, and modifier effects in long term of various magnitude. The dynamics of resource changes in their per se availability, quality and utilization changes with time and newer scenarios emerge that should be valued in its entirety of inter-relationships.

Sustainable agriculture was practiced for nearly 6000 years of the pre industrial era from 8000 to 2000 BC, without much disruption of nature (T. Crews et al., 1991, R. Lowrance et al., 1986). Sustainable agriculture is defined as a system that, over the future, enhances environmental quality and therefore the resource base on which agriculture depends provides for basic human food and fibre needs is economically viable and enhances the standard of life for farmers and society as a whole (C. B. Flora, 1992 and E. V. Kambewa, 2007). In addition, sustainable agriculture is defined as a commitment to satisfy human food and fibre needs and to reinforce the standard of life for farmers and society as an entire, now and into the future.

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