Primary production sustainability

Abstract As the technology of agriculture advances, the need for assessing its sustainability becomes essential, regarding the determination of the feasibility of existing or newly introduced systems and practices. Toward that direction many tools and methods have been introduced attempting to evaluate and determine the synergy of the three pillars of sustainability and provide decision makers and stakeholders with integrated results. The holistic approach is probably the most critical challenge for agricultural sustainability, and still consensus has not been reached regarding its definition and the methods used. Among the methods found in literature that assess the sustainability of agricultural practices, indicator sets and tools are probably the most widely used. In that light, this chapter attempts to provide an overview of the concept of agricultural sustainability and sustainable agriculture and the means of its evaluation. Based on a thorough literature review of the agricultural sustainability assessments of the last decade, the indicators used were systematically documented and indexed. The resulting index shows that there are a large number of indicators for every category of impact and level of assessment adjustable to the scope of each evaluation, highlighting the need for widely accepted tools.