Journal
LAND USE POLICY
Volume 69, Issue -, Pages 102-105Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2017.09.014
Keywords
Agro-ecology; Consumer preferences; High-tech production; Land sharing; Land sparing; Naturalistic fallacy; Naturalness; Soil-less production; Sustainable intensification; Vertical farming
Categories
Funding
- Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF through the National Research Programme Sustainable Use of Soil as a Resource [NRP 68]
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Agriculture faces huge challenges regarding sustainable use of soils and its sustainability performance in general. There are three different approaches to sustainable agricultural production commonly proposed, namely intensification, agro-ecological approaches and high-tech industrial approaches. Often, some propose that only agro-ecological approaches are truly sustainable options, with particular benefits for soil protection, while others argue that intensification or high-tech perfonns better through land sparing. In this viewpoint, we scrutinize the notion of sustainable agricultural production and the role these approaches may play for such, in particular addressing the controversy of naturalness versus artificiality in production systems. Consumers often perceive agriculture as natural, but agriculture today thrives always on strong human intervention. We posit that agriculture is linked to soils and natural processes, but that this provides little guidance on what sustainable agriculture should be. Being natural need not be an aspect of being sustainable. If it is, arguments for this need to be provided. Furthermore, revealed consumer preferences may much less frequently posit being natural as a central criterion for food consumed than usually assumed. By all this, we do not want to promote any of those three approaches uncritically. We rather argue for enlarging the option space for sustainable agriculture in an unprejudiced way.
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