Intensive Agriculture and Sustainability: A Farming Systems Analysis

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the former editor of the journal, Ontario History. He is the author
of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality and Canadian History to
1967, and the co-author of The College o

Agriculture is art and science: art in combining the elements to produce
the desired product and science in understanding how the elements are
combined in order to improve the outcome. Until the middle of the 19th
century, agricultural production was decidedly more art and dependent on
traditional modes of doing things, but the appropriation of scientific
pursuits to agricultural ends began to shift the equation markedly. This
process took the better part of a century, and its revolutionary impact
in developed countries created tremendous growth in output and decline
in farm populations, especially after World War II when tractors,
chemical fertilizers, and pesticides came into full play.

Industrial agriculture brought Canadians and Americans the cheapest
food in the world. By the end of the 20th century, Canadians on average
were spending only half of what they had been spending for food 50 years
earlier. As science worked miracles in the fields and barns of the
nation, growing concerns arose about sustainability in view of the
potentially damaging effects of farming on land, air, and water. In
Ontario, one has only to mention the town of Walkerton to invoke images
of cattle manure seeping into groundwater that, improperly treated,
caused human deaths.

University of Guelph land resource scientist Murray H. Miller undertook
studies of runoff from agriculture around the Great Lakes that led to
changes in Canadian and American law. Concerned that the science of
agriculture had become too fragmented along disciplinary lines to
adequately address the issues of sustainability, he promoted farming
systems research that attempts an integrative approach to studying the
interactions between agriculture and the environment. This book provides
a broad cross-section of such approaches to and models for farming
systems analysis.

Beginning with an overview section, the volume contains 12 chapters
that analyze framework and linkages as well as applications related to
sustainability. Reader interested in a more holistic approach to farming
and the environment are likely to find much that is engaging and
intellectually challenging in this work.