Today the goal of designing highly productive, sustainable agricultural
produc- tion systems is at the forefront of the agricultural research
agenda around the world. The key to designing sustainable agricultural
production technologies is in understanding their economic,
environmental, and human health impacts. This volume presents a
methodology designed to quantify such impacts and to represent them as
tradeoff's. We propose this tradeoff' methodology as an approach to
accomplish two essential elements in achieving agricultural
sustainability. First, the tradeoff's method is a key to the design of
successful interdisciplinary research projects to assess sustainability
of production systems. Second, the tradeoff's method provides a
successful means to communicate research findings to policy makers and
the public. To put this effort into perspective, we would like to
explain its origins and reflect on its implications for conducting
future research. In 1987, the Rockefeller Foundation commissioned a
report that set out to ascertain why, in view ofthe extensive
literatures on certain classes of agricul- tural pollution, there had
been few if any attempts to incorporate pollution externalities into the
rather voluminous literature on the assessment of agricultural research
impacts (Antle and Capalbo, 1988; see also Antle, 1994).