Principles of Sustainable Agriculture: Defining Standardized Reference Points

Abstract

No question remains regarding our need to change toward sustainable agriculture. When ranking the industries that have more prevalent environmental impacts, agriculture holds a considerable share of responsibility. However, as sustainability is an ambiguous concept surrounded by controversy and debate, rather than attempt to describe its meaning through a single universal definition, we instead stressed the need to delineate a set of fundamental principles. With the goal of putting the sustainable-agriculture concept into practice, an inductive qualitative content analysis was employed based on multivariate methods on hundreds of different definitions, theories, notions and sustainability indicators gathered through a deep-structured literature review. Through this novel approach, we were able to identify four fundamental principles for sustainable agriculture (integrated management, dynamic balance, regenerative design, and social development), and concluded that in order to shift our current agricultural systems into more efficient and sustainable ones, we need to start making better use of natural and human resources. This work provides guidelines for reference that can be used by anyone whenever they make a decision regarding sustainable agriculture or apply a methodology to assess a particular behavior, process or situation.