Toward integrated assessment in agriculture

Practitioners of agriculture increasingly find themselves in conflict with the broader society over issues such as siting of livestock rearing facilities and the presence of chemicals in water resources. This is probably a function both of urban development encroaching further into agricultural lands, and of the emerging norm of broader participation in environmental decisions. Numerous public debates over these issues shape the ways by which society reconciles its need for agriculture with the inevitable impacts on nature. Scientific knowledge plays an important role in these debates, but no more so than do human values. Agricultural scientists must seek ways to best inform these debates, while respecting the roles of values. The emerging approach of integrated assessment, now in use in larger-scale issues such as global change and acid rain, appears to have applicability to agriculture. A central component of integrated assessment is the integrated assessment model (IAM), a system model incorporating diverse facets of a problem, so interactions among these facets can be seen. The systems tradition in agriculture, including hard and soft variants, may be viewed as precursors to the IAM approach. Academic agriculturists should begin to create the IAMs that are needed to inform the emerging public debates surrounding agriculture, society, and nature.