Diffuse pollution from intensive agriculture: sustainability, challenges, and opportunities

Global expansion and intensification of industrialized agriculture during the last 50 years was facilitated by the replacement of labor by imported chemicals and energy, thus changing the economics and the social fabric of rural communities as well as impairing water, air, and soil resources essential to sustaining food and fiber production in a world with an increasing appetite. To effectively understand and solve complex problems resulting from this agricultural revolution, expanded communications are needed at a variety of levels. It is critical for the technical community to communicate through greater interdisciplinary research among agronomists, soil scientists, hydrologists, ecologists, and others to reduce diffuse pollution from agriculture. Also, more effective translations of technical problems and solutions are needed to influence policy. Accurate advice is needed in spite of the uncertainties that scientists too often use to obscure useful information. Education will be needed for producers and conservationists to gain confidence that promised environmental responses will occur if solutions are to be implemented at more than experimental or demonstration scales. The search for comprehensive solutions to environmental degradation will require understanding the ultimate causes of pollution, not just the proximal causes. The ultimate causes will only be found by examining the systems that facilitate the release of contaminants to the environment such as the wholesale landscape changes that replaced grazing land with annual crops leading to increased leaching and runoff. Research and demonstration projects increasingly need collaborations among agronomists, livestock scientists, soil scientists, hydrologists, economists, sociologists and others who have a stake in the study of diffuse pollution and the outcomes of any proposed solutions. Partnerships developed at the working level where basic principles can be shared will help avoid the pursuit of impractical solutions when viewed from different perspectives.