Developing Indicators of Sustainable Agriculture at Farm Level

Abstract

Farmers in Rurukan, (North Sulawesi, Indonesia), have long experience with conventional agricultural practices to vegetables farming in unsuitable upland areas. So far its negative impacts have sufficient evidence and that the actual production mode may not be sustainable. A practically-holistic measures which describe the sustainability of farming system in that area and to facilitate its assessment, had been developed through the following stages: farm characterizing, identification of critical issues, propose specific indicators for sustainability and, farmers assessment. The assessment of proposed indicators was involved local farmers, and that the indicators proposed were sorted under the most relevant key issues of sustainable farming and were arranged within the hierarchical framework of Principles, Criteria, Indicators. We proposed 20 sustainability indicators which most relate to outcome measures and partly in sustainability efforts. We also identified 8 environmental topics, 7 economic topics and 5 social topics. Farmers prefer two indicators attributed to economic aspect (farm income and output price stability) as the most important for sustainability of their farm, followed by one indicator attributed to social aspect (stakeholders supporting) and then two indicators attributed to environment aspect (erosion control and pest and disease control).