ABSTRACT
A sustainable agricultural system is a system that is politically and socially acceptable, economically viable, agrotechnically adaptable, institutionally manageable, and environmentally sound. Satisfying all these sustainability requirements and the relevant analytical criteria is a complex endeavor; so complex that it may never be implemented for any one system or region. Less comprehensive methods of sustainability assessment, which focus on a particular facet, are more practical to implement but result in greater uncertainty about the overall sustainability of the agroecosystem (Farshad and Zinck, 1993; Zinck and Farshad, 1995).
