Review on Sustainable Agriculture and Some Key Indicators

Evolution and development of sustainable as well as relevant concepts, methods have been reviewed in the paper. Sustainable involves the successful management of resources for to satisfy changing human needs while maintaining or enhancing the quality of environment and conserving natural resources base. The term “sustainable agriculture was coined to substitute the high input and output featured industrial when it has achieved what it was expected and began to produce more problems than it can solve. Although the concept of “sustainable agriculture has been widely acknowledged, accepted and quoted, it means different thing with different people, just as myriads of answers to its definition. However, three common themes: ecological soundness, economic viability and social justice are exceptionally included in each definition. The goal of agricultural sustainability expects to be obtained through tradeoffs among the three common themes. Ecology is the theoretical base for sustainable as agricultural productive systems are special ecosystems themselves and sustainability is closely related to various ecological processes and functions, such as hydrological cycling, energy flow and biodiversity and so on. Study on agricultural sustainability requires a way of system and cooperation of multi-discipline as sustainability will be achieved through the balance among various objectives and needs efforts from biologists, chemists, physician and socialists and so on.Quantification of sustainability remains to be the goal of the study of sustainable agriculture. Attempts tried to attain it have throw lights on working out key indicators for agricultural sustainability. Soil quality, water and biodiversity are generally nodded indicators for measurement of ecological sustainability. Soil microbes are sensitive and precautious to whatever changes happened to soil and biological index are held to have greater potentiality to reflect the integrity of soil. Water availability, utilization efficiency and pollution and contamination degree are essential components when water quality is considered. Diverse species in a system helps to maintain it stable and efficient. Biodiversity in an agricultural system includes tillage measures, such as intercropping, rotation and multi-tillage and so on; index for agricultural landscape diversity and fragmentation; and quality of wildlife's habitat. Attention has also been focused on sustainable development in China. Traditional cann't meet the demand for food with the growing population and current agricultural production has been creating environmental problems and risks development of future agricultural production. 21 st century finds four challenges for development in China. They are: pressure from big population; negative effects of global change, such as frequent occurrence of hot currents and shortage of water for irrigation; soil desertification and degradation; lose and maladjustment of biodiversity. Four aspects are believed to be indicators for the sustainability of future agriculture: improved quantity and quality of agricultural products; prevention of soil desertification and degradation; high efficiency use of water and conservation and restoration of biodiversity. Outlines of sustainable development for 21 st century have also been discussed in the paper at different scales.