System hierarchy and sustainable farming system development

Sustainability of agricultural production systems is often evaluated in terms of their impacts on ecological, socio-cultural and economic aspects. Here it is presumed that each of these sustainability aspects is particularly associated with a system level. Ecological sustainability is associated with the system level of highest aggregation. Threats to biodiversity and the global climate act on continental or global scale. Economic sustainability, on the other hand, is the governing factor at relatively low aggregation levels (e.g. a farm). Socio-cultural sustainability has a relatively qualitative nature. It deals with collective human affinity with culture (which includes agriculture) and history, and it affects the way in which nature, landscape and agricultural production systems are appreciated. Socio-cultural sustainability is of particular importance at the regional level. A feature common to all kind of hierarchies is that higher system levels have priority of action over lower system levels. This implies that higher-system-level demands for ecological and socio-cultural sustainability should put constraints for development of lower system levels. Farm sustainability still depends largely on economics. Hence, sustainability implies that more collective system levels (global, national and regional) have the privilege of putting constraints on more individual levels (farms), but also the duty of securing the economic needs of individual farmers. It is concluded that organic farming systems incorporate to a large extent ecological and socio-cultural values, and presently for organic dairy farmers in the Netherlands this is not at the expense of farm-economic sustainability.