Let farmers judge

Mrs Christine Karuru owns a 9-acre farm in Mangu village, about an hour's drive northeast of Nairobi, in the central Kenyan highlands. Population pressure is high, and continuous cropping has led to depletion and deterioration of the land resource. In Christine's words, 'Ordinary farming has failed so obviously in this area'. That is why Christine decided to turn her farm into an organic farm. She learned about the necessary practices from KIOF, the Kenyan Institute of Organic Farming. Now she has succeeded in introducing composting, the recycling of nutrients, the use of liquid manure, crop diversification, double digging, crop rotation, natural pesticides, mulching and the use of leguminous trees. She is even being asked to educate other farmers in the area interested in taking up organic farming. But is her farm more sustainable or less sustainable than it was before? What is sustainability, and what is sustainable-the farm, the watershed, the natural resource base, the crop or livestock production system, or the livelihood of Christine and her family? In other words, how can sustainability best be assessed? The need for sustainable agriculture is now generally accepted, but the discussion of what sustainability means is still confused. Detailed comparative analyses of the sustainablity of different systems and practices are few, and the methodology for conducting such analyses remains to be developed and standardized. It was in response to this situation that ILEIA organized, in December 1990, an international workshop on Assessing the Effectiveness of Low-external-input Farming Techniques. The main theme of the workshop was how to assess techniques for managing soil fertility-a problem central to the pursuit of sustainable agriculture. A literature search was made, publications on different technologies and on various aspects of environmental economics were studied, and members of the ILEIA network offered their views in a baseline paper. Twenty-eight people from different backgrounds-farming. policy making, research, development-and different countries were invited to share their experiences at the workshop. The results were edited and, together with other relevant articles, published in a special issue of the ILEIA Newsletter (1 and 2, 1991). This reader is a follow-up to that workshop. It is a collection of papers on the theme of assessing sustainability in agriculture. The collection is divided into four parts. Follow ing an introductory theme paper (Part I), the papers in Part II discuss the conceptual framework for assessment. Part III examines specific methodological issues, with the emphasis on farmers' assessment criteria. Part IV contains case studies comparing the performance of environmentally friendly farming practices and systems with that of conventional (high-external-input) agriculture. The objective of this reader is to keep the non-specialist in agricultural economics informed about the current debate on how to assess sustainability and the effectiveness of low-external-input agriculture. Its title, Let Farmers Judge, reflects an important.