Challenges for Sustainable Agriculture and Farming

What are some of the challenges to sustainable farming?

1. Tailor to local system

Practices must also be tailored to the local system - one size cannot fit all. Variations increase across countries with different climates, growing seasons, pests, diseases and crop varieties. 

2. Measurement

Baselines and measurement tools are not common practice and we don’t even have many of the tools yet. Whole-farm carbon audits vary dramatically in their outputs.

3. Dealing with complex ecosystems

All monitoring is attempting to measure or model highly complex, balanced ecosystems, which contain multiple feedback loops and subterranean interactions that we don’t fully understand. 

4. Understanding soil 

Our understanding of soil and soil organic matter is limited, as is our ability to monitor full carbon fluxes through a system. Reliable, scalable monitoring is a key component for verifying carbon offset programmes. 

5. End-to-end emissions

Truly managing emissions requires an understanding of full, end-to-end emissions through the food system. Turning off local production to import produce from overseas can simply result in importing more carbon emissions or water pollution from elsewhere. 

6. Trade connectivity

We need to be wary of connectivity with such interlinked global trade - changing standards at one end of the trade will have impacts on other countries from changing buying habits or standards. Rapid unplanned changes as preferences change can have multi-year economic impacts.