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Rivers, MB | I think we can't assume that.
To me, the soil health is key. That is what is feeding us and is our growing medium. Anytime, you take out more than you put in, it is unsustainable long term.
ChristianH points were very good and described my thoughts well.
I get frustrated when I see farmers do things that hurt there soil long term.
A few examples: hay farmers that don't truly figure what they are removing in nutrients when the bale leaves the field, cattle farmers that want straw for free because they don't realize the value of the nutrients in the straw, grain farmers that burn their straw as the simple way to manage a problem, grain farmers that try and grow a crop and only replace a fraction of the nutrients that they remove (exhaust injection, Alpine phoshorus, Avail, Jumpstart).
Before anyone jumps on the examples, I will qualify them by saying that under certain circumstances in certain situations, all of them can work or be used to "fix" a certain problem in a certain year and we have tried and or used some of them on our farm. However, long-term, I don't see any of my examples as sustainable. Although, I'm open to learning more about any one of them.
The example of one of the posters above that described the "old" way of farming w/ animals and very little inputs is unsustainable to me. You are still removing something from the land and not replace the nutrients/O.M. that was removed.
Sustainable agriculture is not necessarily profitable agriculture. Sad but true.
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Sustainable Agriculture definition please...
