Farmers' definitions, goals, and bottlenecks of sustainable agriculture in the North-Central Region

Since its inception in 1988, the SARE program has sponsored hundreds of projects to explore and apply economically viable, environmentally sound, and socially acceptable farming systems. Recognizing that researchers often collaborated with producers and that producer interest in sustainable agriculture was increasing, SARE's North-Central Region began directly funding farmers and ranchers in 1992 to test their own ideas on sustainable agriculture. The present article is based on data from the formative evaluation of the first five years (1992 to 1996) of the NCR-SARE Producer Grant Program. The evaluation used a combination of mail surveys, non-response telephone interviews, and personal interviews. The evaluation revealed that the Program has succeeded in showing that sustainable agricultural technologies and practices can be viable and profitable alternatives to conventional ways of producing crops and animals while simultaneously being less environmentally damaging. On the other hand, the contributions of the Producer Grant Program to the social and institutional spheres in which agriculture is embedded are less clear. Changes in these spheres are imperative for the success of sustainable agriculture, and for it to become more mainstream. Such changes cannot occur overnight, but they will remain the main challenge for SARE to tackle in the near future. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.