Sustainable agriculture is among the most urgently needed work in the United States, for at least three reasons: we face an environmental crisis, a health crisis, and a rural economic crisis. Addressing these pressing crises through sustainability transition will require growing our agricultural workforce: both because the current farm population is aging, and because sustainable agriculture is knowledge-intensive work that substitutes experiential knowledge of farm ecosystems for harmful industrial inputs. Given its social value, sustainable agriculture ought to be a welcoming profession. But at present, US agriculture is decidedly unwelcoming for nearly all who work in it – and it puts new entry and sustainable farmers at a distinct disadvantage. In this paper, we first examine why it is so hard to enter and succeed in sustainable farming. We find that new entrants struggle to gain critical access, assets, and assistance, encountering substantial barriers that stand between them and the land, capital, markets, equipment, water, labor, and training and technical assistance they need to succeed. Secondly, we review promising policy and civil society interventions targeted at addressing these barriers, nearly all of which have already been piloted at the local and state levels or through modest public funding. These interventions are most effective, we find, when they are linked up through robustly governed networks to provide “wraparound” coverage for new entry sustainable farmers. Such networks can help patch together complementary sources of support (e.g. federal, state, local, NGO, cooperative) and synergistically address multiple barriers at once. Finally, we propose additional interventions that are more aspirational today, but that could offer important pathways to support new sustainable farmers in the longer term.

In the face of rapidly advancing climate change, biodiversity loss, and water scarcity, it is clear that global agriculture must swiftly and decisively shift toward sustainability. Fortunately, farmers and researchers have developed a thoroughly studied pathway to this transition: agroecological farming systems that mimic natural ecosystems, creating tightly coupled cycles of energy, water, and nutrients. A critical and underappreciated feature of agroecological systems is that they replace fossil fuel-and chemical-intensive management with knowledge-intensive management. Hence, the greatest sustainability challenge for agriculture may well be that of replacing non-renewable resources with ecologically-skilled people, and doing so in ways that create and support desirable rural livelihoods. Yet over the past century, US agriculture has been trending in the opposite direction, rapidly replacing knowledgeable people with non-renewable resources and eroding rural economies in the process. Below, we suggest how US policy could pivot to enable and support the ecologically skilled workforce needed to achieve food security in the face of climate change.

Humanity faces a triple threat of climate change, biodiversity loss, and global food insecurity. In response, increasing the general adaptive capacity of farming systems is essential. We identify two divergent strategies for building adaptive capacity. Simplifying processes seek to narrowly maximize production by shifting the basis of agricultural production toward centralized control of socially and ecologically homogenized systems. Diversifying processes cultivate social-ecological complexity in order to provide multiple ecosystem services, maintain management flexibility, and promote coordinated adaptation across levels. Through five primarily United States focused cases of distinct agricultural challenges—foodborne pathogens, drought, marginal lands, labor availability, and land access and tenure—we compare simplifying and diversifying responses to assess how these pathways differentially enhance or degrade the adaptive capacity of farming systems in the context of the triple threat. These cases show that diversifying processes can weave a form of broad and nimble adaptive capacity that is fundamentally distinct from the narrow and brittle adaptive capacity produced through simplification. We find that while there are structural limitations and tradeoffs to diversifying processes, adaptive capacity can be facilitated by empowering people and enhancing ecosystem functionality to proactively distribute resources and knowledge where needed and to nimbly respond to changing circumstances. Our cases suggest that, in order to garner the most adaptive benefits from diversification, farming systems should balance the pursuit of multiple goals, which in turn requires an inclusive process for active dialogue and negotiation among diverse perspectives. Instead of locking farming systems into pernicious cycles that reproduce social and ecological externalities, diversification processes can enable nimble responses to a broad spectrum of possible stressors and shocks, while also promoting social equity and ecological sustainability.

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