Today the goal of designing highly productive, sustainable agricultural production systems is at the forefront of agricultural research agendas around the world. This text argues the key to designing sustainable agricultural production technologies is in understanding their economic, environmental, and human health impacts. It presents a methodology designed to quantify such impacts and to represent them as tradeoffs. This tradeoff methodology is proposed as an approach to accomplish two elements in achieving agricultural sustainability. First, the tradeoffs method is a key to the design of successful interdisciplinary research projects for assessing sustainability of production systems. Second, the tradeoffs method provides a means of communicating research findings to policy makers and the public.
