ABSTRACT
Goals of scholarly work in agriculture include developing a richer understanding of this essential human endeavor and analyzing potential for interventions into current practice. Such interventions are motivated by a great diversity of issues, for example, less pollution, greater resource efficiency, more stable production, greater social equity. Conway (1985, 1987) introduced “agroecosystem analysis” as a framework for study of farming endeavors, connecting both the concept of the agroecosystem and its analysis, leading toward “systems thinking.” The idea of the system, that is, “… a group of interacting components, operating together for a common purpose, capable of reacting as a whole to external stimuli: it is unaffected by its own outputs and has a specified boundary based on the inclusion of all significant feedbacks” (Spedding 1988, p. 18) and systems thinking are now commonplace in a wide range of endeavors, from business management, to health care, to ecology. Indeed, the essence of ecosystem ecology is systems thinking about biota and the relationships among themselves and with their physicochemical environment.
