Our College has adopted an “ecological paradigm” (2, 42). What this means is that “anything we do in the college or recommend to the public through educational programs must occur only after we seriously consider the impact there might be on production efficiency, economic viability, social responsibility, and environmental compatibility.”

Historically agricultural colleges tried to find out how to increase and improve production of plant and animal food and fiber so that producers could make more money (3).

In the last fifty years we have come to see that the production of food and fiber occurs in an environment which is shared with people and many other organisms (4). Most of the people whose lives are influenced by agriculture are not farmers themselves, but agriculture has become a dominant force shaping the environment in the US and around the world (5).

One way of appreciating this is to consider that 40% of the earth’s total productivity is now for human use (6). No species has ever been in this position before and our use of the global ecosystem affects every place on earth and every other organism. One aspect of our global impact is our growing realization of our role in climate change (7, 8).

In developed countries most people no longer face a struggle to obtain food and clothing from their immediate environment (9). They are increasingly concerned with how it feels to live in that environment. Some of the crops that are produced may have no food or fiber value (10). Production of ornamentals has become a major industry on a similar scale to agronomic crops. There may be conflicts between agricultural and other uses of the environment. Different people might argue that a piece of farmland (11) should become a nature preserve, a recreational area or a housing development (12).

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Even if it remains as farmland people outside the agricultural community may want to impose constraints on farming practice so that environmental values are maintained. This might mean preserving a stand of trees at the edge of a field (13), avoiding odors produced by intensive animal operations (14) or avoiding pollution of a nearby river by fertilizer (15).

Changes in agricultural technology can also have more direct social effects on rural communities. Development of small-scale production of high value products (16, 17) can provide opportunities for many small producers and retard depopulation of rural areas with all of its consequences for the quality of rural life.

So it is impossible to ignore the social consequences of the research and educational programs in a college of agriculture (18). But there are deeper concerns than the immediate experience of quality of rural life. In its broadest sense agriculture is about the use that we make of the living things on this planet and the underlying resources (19, 20, 21). We have arrived at a point where we are in control of the fate of genetic diversity (22): how much of the variation within and between species will we maintain (23) and how many species will we allow to become extinct or even try to exterminate? (24)

Agricultural operations draw on soil, water and atmosphere and they also influence the composition and quality of these resources (25). The effects of degradation in soil, water or atmospheric quality can be as far-reaching as the loss of biodiversity and all of these changes are inter-related (26). Because of the scale of human influence on the planet, we have become individually and collectively custodians of all of these irreplaceable resources (27). We need to understand how they are affected by our actions so that we can preserve their value as well as extracting the value of the crop that we hope to produce (28).

People often think that ecology applies only to wild plants and animals in “natural” settings (29). One definition of ecology is “the study of the relationship between organisms and their physical and biological environments”. In agriculture we tend to see the crop in isolation from its environment (31); we may not be fully aware of the other organisms interacting with it (32) or how the environment is affected by the cultivation of the crop (33). An ecological perspective on agriculture will allow us to look beyond the crop to understand how other organisms and the physical environment are affected locally and across time and space.

In this course we adopt a broad definition of a crop as any plant that is grown for human use or enjoyment. Thus crops can include bedding plants (34) shrubs (35) and turf (36) as well as tomatoes (37) and corn (38). Many crop plants are grown in fields (39) but others are grown in greenhouses (40), gardens or interior-scapes (41). It would be logical to include forest trees grown for pulp or lumber but forestry has traditionally been a separate discipline at this and other universities. This course is an introduction to agronomy and horticulture from an ecological perspective. Often the broad term “agricultural” will be used to cover both.

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