Sustainable agriculture seeks to create an economically viable, socially supportive, and environmentally sound farming system. However, current tools to monitor the sustainability of agriculture at the meso-scale across the United States are rarely available. Drawing data from the 2012 Census of Agriculture, a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on ten indicators: chemicals purchased per farm ($1,000), gasoline, fuels, and oils purchased per farm ($1,000), farms practicing rotational or management-intensive grazing (%), organic farms (%), CSA farms (%), farms selling to individuals (%), operators whose primary occupation is farming (%), hired farm labor per farm (number), market value of agricultural products sold per farm ($1,000), and net farm income of the operations per farm ($1,000), helps identify a three-factor structure of agricultural sustainability across counties in the United States.
The environmental sustainability component refers to farming practices about to reduce environmental degradation; the economic sustainability factor highlights farmers’ livelihood and the efficiency of agricultural production; and the social sustainability component identifies practices that tend to promote economic viability and maintain stable rural communities. In general, the agroecology approach, which provides a theoretical basis for sustainability, helps understand the interactions and relationships among the diverse components of the agricultural production system.
To offer more insights into the nationwide development of sustainable farming, a cluster analysis on factor score indexes derived from the CFA is used to characterize the typology of agricultural sustainability at the county level. The results indicate that the classification includes five distinct groups. In terms of geography, the high social category was primarily located in the New England, along the Pacific Coast of California, Washington, and Oregon, and around the Northern Great Lakes. Counties in the extremely low environment & extremely high economy group were particularly found along the Lower Mississippi Valley. The others in this group were dispersed in states in the Midwest and in California, North Carolina, and Florida, for example. While both of the high environment & low economy and moderate intensity groups tend to be widespread in the United States, they seem to be absent in the Midwest. Counties in the low environment & high economy group, however, were primarily located in the Northern Great Plains and in Iowa and Illinois.
Through empirically examining the components of agricultural sustainability, such analyses not only add to the literature that has recognized that agricultural sustainability is multi-dimensional, but they also help delineate different sustainable farming segments and explain how sustainable agriculture is structured nationally. In sum, the current study aims to advance conceptual and methodological contributions to the existing literature amid the recent surge of more empirical evidence in the United States.
