Low-Input Sustainable Agriculture

Is it possible to farm profitably while conserving natural resources and protecting the environment? There are farmers across the country who think so, or at least want to try. The approach they are using, or looking into, is now called "low-input sustainable agriculture" (LISA). This type of farming is giving new meaning to the role of farm management.

What Is LISA?

LISA is a way of thinking about farming. It incorporates some ideas found in what people have labeled ecological, organic, regenerative, biological, or simply alternative agriculture.

Among the goals that now drive the interest in low-input sustainable agriculture, two stand out: profitable and productive fanning, and protection of resources and environmental quality. Companion objectives include ensuring safe and nutritious food supplies and reducing health risks to farmworkers.

LISA involves farmers substituting management, scientific information, and on- farm resources for some of the purchased inputs they currently depend on for their farming enterprises. LISA techniques include rotations, crop and livestock diversification, soil and water conserving practices, mechanical cultivation, and biological pest controls.

Low-input sustainable agriculture offers no magical formula for profitable farming. You will not find a recipe for it in any how-to book. "Sustainable" means the capability to continue producing food and fiber indefinitely and profitably without damaging the natural resources and environmental quality on which all of us depend.

"Low-input" is a catchword for what many feel is a primary requirement for economic and environmental sustainability in farming the need to cut back on purchased off-farm inputs. These especially include synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides, but also livestock growth stimulants.

How can farmers reduce their use of purchased chemicals? Haven't these purchased inputs made it possible for farmers to specialize and to produce abundantly more than they could without chemicals? Potentially profitable alternatives to the chemical-intensive,capital-intensive conventional agriculture can take different forms.

Rotations, soil building practices, and crop-livestock diversification are some of the tools at the farmer's disposal. Legume rotations and use of green manure (crops planted specifically to be plowed under to enrich the soil) can supply plant nutrients, often without making it necessary for the crop farmer to also have livestock as a source of manure. Of course, livestock can serve the additional role of harvesting hay and forage produced as part of the farm's rotation. Soil and water conserving practices, including or in combination with rotations, enhance soil quality and productivity. Rotations also help control weeds, insects, and plant diseases.

With LISA, pests can be prevented or controlled without using chemicals. Mechanical cultivation can substitute for chemical weed killers. And farmers may simply call on their plants to control weeds. For example, rotations and crop diversification may include a crop like rye specifically because it is toxic to weeds. Integrated pest management can play an important role, also. Scouting of fields to monitor insect infestations is one way to limit the use of insecticides to a when-needed basis. Biological techniques, such as use of beneficial insect predators, can often eliminate the need for insecticides entirely. (See Part V, Chapter 5 on integrated pest management.)

The right set of low-input sustainable practices has to be discovered, rediscovered, and honed for each farm. What works on one farm may fail on another. This fact emphasizes the role Of farm management. Low-input farmers, in effect, are working to substitute brainpower for chemicals. True, the farm management process for achieving satisfactory low-input farming involves the familiar steps of planning compiling information, making decisions, buying inputs that the farm cannot produce, selling products, and identifying and solving problems along the way. Depending on the farm for inputs as well as outputs presents greater management challenges. Low-input farming involves experimenting, figuring out how to cooperate with nature and how to benefit from the partnership rather than concentrating on ways to overcome natural forces.

Why the Interest?

Farmers and nonfarmers alike are becoming more and more interested in this new type of agriculture.

Environmental Quality and Resource Conservation Reasons. Conventional agriculture's reliance on synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides has caused or aggravated many problems. Once seen as a basic and beneficial link to our natural environment, agriculture is now widely cited as a cause of pollution. Ground water contamination due to the leaching of agrichemicals is perhaps the environmental problem of greatest concern today. Vulnerability of ground water to contamination is widespread. And unlike surface water, ground water can be very difficult and sometimes impossible to clean up once it is is contaminated.

However, purchased chemicals are not always the culprits. Excessive leaching of nutrients from livestock manure, a problem in areas such as the Chesapeake Bay region, can be a major source of pollution. Farmers are just as concerned about the ground water problem as anyone. Water in farm wells is often the first to become contaminated.

Water quality is not the only environmental concern. Intensive cropping with heavy use of agrichemicals has often led to adverse on- and off-farm effects such as soil erosion, depletion of irrigation water supplies, and loss of fish and wildlife habitats. Despite efforts to curb erosion spanning 5 decades, loss of topsoil persists in lessening the productivity of farmland and causing sedimentation and other runoff problems estimated to cost billions of dollars a year to correct.

Economic Reasons. Farmers, though concerned about adverse environmental impacts of conventional fanning practices, must make a decent living. In fact, it took the farm financial stress of the 1980's to raise substantial farmer interest in reducing chemical inputs in order to survive financially. Many farmers began to see low-input sustainable agriculture as one way to cut their production costs and debts, and therefore stay in business. Growing farmer interest in the economics of low-input agriculture has helped to broaden the idea to accommodate reduced-chemical as well as no-chemical practices.

The economic rationale for low-input sustainable farming has other roots. Farmers remain concerned about the rising costs and uncertain availability of pesticides. Over time, weeds and insects develop a resistance to previously effective pesticides. So farmers have to use more of those chemicals or alternative chemicals more often just to stay even with new pest resistances. The use of many of the pesticides they have come to depend on could be banned or restricted quickly if they are found to cause unacceptable health risks. The costs to chemical companies of developing, testing, and registering pesticides is going up, which means higher and higher future pesticide costs to farmers.