A Time to Choose came about in a setting of substantial turmoil. In the late 1970s, agriculture felt that it was on a roller coaster. Earlier in the decade, it had experienced the huge sales to the Soviet Union, short crops around the world, very high prices, and very high incomes. Then it came down the hill into a very unstable period that was substantially different from the relative stability of the 1950s and 1960s. Energy problems, which had begun early in the 1970s, had not had much of an effect while prices and incomes were high, but when the boom ended, the high cost of energy hurt farmers badly. The general economy was seriously overheated, and inflation was very high. The budget situation, which in retrospect seems tame compared with today's, looked very threatening at the time. In fact, from 1979 to 1980 the deficit increased 80%, something that was very much on people's minds as they were judging policy options. Finally, unusually rapid structural changes were taking place, with farms becoming larger but fewer.

The United States Department of Agriculture's Report and Recommendations on Organic Farming (1980) is destined to be a milestone in the evolution of agriculture's scientific paradigm. Such recognition, however, will come several years in the future and will require a key scientific breakthrough for full assessment of the “new world” its authors brought forward to the mainstream scientific community.

As someone who was very much involved in the organic fanning study, it is interesting for me to look at the study 13 years later in relation to where agriculture stands today. I think that both the organic farming and the structure of agriculture studies have had a major impact on agricultural policy, and that Secretary Bergland should be commended for having had the foresight and courage to commission them.

Much of what has been said regarding the two USDA reports relates to social organization: How do we organize science? How is indigenous knowledge organized? How is our food system organized? Social organization implies we have choices: at the individual level, the household level, the community level, the regional level, and the national level. It also means we must be aware of the global context in which our actions occur. Social organization is context-specific; one size does not fit all.

I was down on the farm when the Bergland reports on organic farming and the structure of agriculture were released. I thought at the time they were a “breath of fresh air.” At last we were having a national dialogue on how we should farm and who would farm. I was very disappointed in 1981 when this dialogue seemed to come to a screeching halt. It had been so refreshing to watch people get involved in these important issues.

History is the greatest teacher of all. As a first step in determining policy options and strategies to encourage sustainable agriculture we should look back and evaluate the past. A review of the 1990 farm bill debate provides six important lessons to guide our future efforts in sustainable agriculture. These lessons can be spelled out this way: Representation; Exhaustion; Frustration, Organization; Retirement; and Mistakes — in sum, REFORM.

Much has been said here about misplaced priorities. I would like to add an example from my own experience. When I was Secretary, I visited the University of California at Davis to review federally funded research. The researchers there showed off a very expensive new piece of machinery developed largely by federal research funds. The machine was designed to pick square, green tomatoes. When I asked “What in the world is this all about?” they explained that we needed to find new ways to eliminate labor. Back in Washington, I asked the same question, and got the same answer.

Soil physical and biological properties often change when different cropping, tillage, or management systems are imposed. Changes occasionally occur quickly, but usually become evident only after months or years. Infiltration rates are affected by several soil properties and may provide the most sensitive indication of changes in soil properties. To evaluate the use of infiltration measurements for detecting changes in soil properties, we conducted infiltration tests on a cropping systems experiment, a tillage experiment, and two beef cattle grazing experiments. In Pennsylvania, significant changes in infiltration rates did not occur until more than four years after converting from a conventional to a low-input cropping system. Infiltration rates were higher on 14th-year no-till plots compared with moldboard plow and chisel treatments in an Iowa tillage study. Earthworm populations and activity were highest in the no-till treatment. Infiltration rates correlated negatively with increased stocking rates in a long-term beef grazing study in Oklahoma. The number of earthworms did not correlate positively with infiltration in this study, suggesting a complex interaction. A short-term study of overwinter beef corn-stalk grazing in Iowa did not show consistent patterns in infiltration rate or other soil properties with different stocking rates. Infiltration appears to be a good indicator of soil structural changes associated with cropping, tillage, and management systems.

In on-farm studies of sustainable agriculture, farmers often have been classified as sustainable according to their organizational affiliation; self identification; or use or non-use of a particular production practice or input, usually synthetic chemicals. Because this is a great oversimplification, researchers recently have been incorporating several dimensions of sustainability into a composite measure. Typically this is a relative measure of sustainability, with scores assigned by comparing individual farmers' practices to those used by all farmers. In contrast, in the farmer sustainability index (FSI) presented here, practices are scored according to their inherent sustainability. We report on the development of an FSI in a case study involving 33 production practices used by 85 cabbage farmers in Malaysia. We describe its underlying principles, the procedure and rationale for scoring each sustainability item, and the result of combining the constituent items into a composite index.

The development of sustainable agriculture in India has been limited by the absence of data on the agricultural and economic viability of ecological agriculture and its longterm prospects. This paper describes a two-year study of seven farm pairs, each consisting of one ecological and one comparable conventional reference farm. The ecological farms differed significantly from the conventional farms in the number of crops grown, the dependence of crop activities on external nutrients, and the number of techniques used to maintain soil fertility and create plant diversity. No significant economic differences were found. Gross income, variable costs, gross margin and net cash income per hectare were in the same range for the two groups of farms. The two groups were similar in average yields for major crops, days of labor per hectare, and total returns per day of labor.