ABSTRACT
This chapter presents two reference points to provide a conceptual setting for the definition of sustainable agriculture and to show evolutionary trends in its development. The first reference point is placed in the early 1980s, with the emergence of the concepts of regenerative agriculture and the articulation of a sustainable agriculture. A second reference point is the increased use of the term sustainable, starting in 1987, to refer to a “stable” agriculture in the global sense, involving all facets of agriculture and its interaction with society. Agricultural evolution always has been guided by a perception of what should be, sometimes called the model, the goal, or even the ideology. The difference between that goal and agriculture as it exists presently is the development gap. US agriculture was in a major expansionist mode during the early 1900s. Agricultural development trends and breakthroughs up to and including the Green Revolution are interestingly summarized by Dahlberg.
