Sustainability is essentially an ecological concept whereby the resources of a natural, ecological system are used by its living forms – plants and animals (including humans) – with a rate that does not exceed the natural rate of their replenishment. In addition, sustainable use of resources is environmental-friendly, i.e. it does not subject the system’s processes and productivity to harmful levels of stress, at the same time not also threatening its biodiversity. Since human growth on this planet is now known to be spinning out of the sustainable bounds, and at the expense of ecological stability, people with foresight and a caring concern for the future of life on earth are resorting to green living. Establishing sustainable farm communities is a major strategy devised for meeting this aim.

A sustainable farm community can be defined as a basically agricultural community that lives by growing crops and breeding animals according to three main principles of sustainability:

•    Maximize economic profit
•    Conserve natural resources and biodiversity
•    Maintain and/or enhance the quality of social life

It goes without saying that all three principles are inter-dependent and violating any one of these disturbs the balance of the system’s components, resulting in increased stress and deterioration of the quality of life. Thus, environmental-friendly practices carried out without paying attention to their costs can create an unhealthy competition for grabbing the most of the available resources in response to financial insecurity. At the same time, the community’s capacity to grow and conserve the quality of life may be at stake. On the other hand, poor environmental management also affects the quality of life by calling in health problems and natural disasters; global warming being a threatening example.

Sustainable farm communities are modeled on natural ecological systems, imitating the green, rural mode of living in which the end products of various life processes are recyclable, i.e. they become a source of energy for another ecologically beneficial process. An important way to attain this sort of natural cyclical sustainability is to practice natural and not industrial agriculture. Bringing natural simplicity to farming automatically increases sustainability of the ecological system that is based on it. This does not mean a radical abandonment of sophisticated lifestyle. But the elements threatening the system’s optimum balance in terms of the three main principles need to be carefully filtered out to a minimum.

The ideal farm community living by sustainable agriculture is one that is keen on maximum biodiversity, satisfactory quality of life, economic affordability of resources, and a disease-free environment for the living members (humans, animals, and plant) of the community.

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