The Sustainability Triangle of Truth

The word “sustainable” is an increasingly controversial one that means different things to different people. In 2005, the UN sought to define “sustainability” through three pillars: social, economic, and environmental sustainability. These three pillars are inter-dependent, and ultimately cannot exist without one another – in other words, something is not long term sustainable unless it is so on an economic, environmental, and social basis.

While this helped clarify the situation somewhat, there remains much controversy as to what constitutes “sustainability” under these three pillars and how they interact with one another. This is particularly noticeable in the agricultural world. Is environmental sustainability about land use, biodiversity, emissions, or more? Does economic sustainability mean cheap food or farmers earning enough to farm? Does social sustainability mean socially sustainable from a consumer or producer perspective? Who pays for sustainability – producer, consumer, government, all of these, or something else? Then there are the subjective/ideological positions that must be considered, such as certain groups not believing that animals should be used in any capacity to provide us with food (which creates problems across all three pillars by removing a valuable sustainability tool from our armory).

There is a concept in project management called “The Triangle of Truth”.

The Triangle of Truth presents that you can only have two things at any given time. If you want something done fast and well, then it won’t be cheap. If you want it done fast and cheap, then it won’t be good. In this article we argue that agricultural sustainability follows a similar pattern, with environmental/social/economic replacing fast/cheap/quality. If you want environmental and social sustainability then it won’t be cheap. If you want economic and environmental sustainability, then it probably won’t be that socially acceptable.

We live in strange times in agriculture at the moment, where seemingly every month an AgTech company will announce The One True Future of Agriculture that involves their product providing sustainability on all three sides of the triangle. This is of course impossible as Ag is simply too large and complex for any silver bullets to be universally applicable on a global basis with homogenous impact. However, new market entrants promising such things have resulted in a lot of noise entering the future of food discussion. In general, the new entrants tend to focus on most heavily on social and environmental sustainability, with economic sustainability to come at a later date. We offer the Sustainability Triangle of Truth as a mental framework for assessing new and old agricultural options. Any time you hear about a new Ag product or process, please take a moment to accept that this new thing is not a solution on its own, will have faults and problems (many of which we will not have encountered before), and will need to work in a complimentary/circular fashion with the broader Ag world in order to be fully successful. Conversely, when one is assessing an older Ag product or process these typically are already economically sustainable but need to work on environmental and social sustainability. So then one must ask, can future development render an older Ag process sufficiently environmentally and socially sustainable to make it part of our future?

Which pillars to focus on?

If we can accept that we can only be sustainable in one or two pillars at any given time, then which two should we focus upon when trying to create a sustainable global Ag system? This is again a controversial subject that every individual will have a different opinion on. We believe it makes sense to focus on the sustainability pillars that have the least amount of subjectivity in determining what constitutes “sustainability”. From that perspective, economic sustainability is the most objective sustainability pillar as it is defined by profitability and affordability (while accepting that market pricing could still be improved a lot – for example today’s pricing mechanism does not take into account environmental impact). So what farming systems do we need to promote to ensure that producers make enough profit to enjoy an actualised life and that the food they produce is affordable to the most at risk in the economy? If economic sustainability is paramount, can we afford the luxury of smallholder farms and the economies of scale they lack?

Environmental sustainability is probably the next most objective pillar, but remains a fraught area of discussion. What is most important for environmental sustainability? GHG emissions? Biodiversity impact? Soil quality? Environmental opportunity cost of land use? Ecological impact?  You could make a hexagon of truth just for environmental sustainability. The EU’s Green New Deal won plaudits globally for the foresight it displayed in dealing with the ecological impact of agriculture. However, these policies will result in lower levels of European food production, necessitating greater dependency on imports from places like Brazil and Argentina. Rewilding in the EU at the cost of greater loss of Amazon and Cerrado habitats may not be a price worth paying. In Ireland, we have a situation where crop-fuelled anaerobic digestion is being pushed forward in the name of environmental sustainability, when there is nothing sustainable about growing monocrops to produce energy on land that could produce food or be re-wilded (though anaerobic digestion of manure makes a lot of sense).

Cows are an interesting topic when it comes to environmental sustainability. The emissions associated with cows are a big problem that is getting deserved attention, however on an ecological, soil, and biodiversity perspective cows on pasture looks much better than crops (largely due to crop pesticide impact, and while accepting that any form of current agriculture is bad for biodiversity and ecology). How can one know which environmental issue to prioritise?

We started Cainthus on the logic that the best way to improve long term environmental sustainability of agriculture was ecological intensification of current land under use, hopefully ultimately reducing how much land we use to make food (more on that in relation to dairy here). Today the greatest ecological sins are committed by our broad acre field crops (in that their dominant method of production systematically degrades the environment required to produce them), and a new method of producing our global staple crops is arguably the most important problem to be solved in global agriculture. However it is very difficult to say that this is objectively the best pathway forward. Some believe in complete separation from natural processes as part of our food production (best represented by vertical farms and cell based meats), but this may not be economically possible for decades. Others believe that removing animals from our food system will deliver greater environmental sustainability, but this is questionable given the important role animals play in nutrition, up-cycling waste, enabling food production on marginal land, and providing soil fertility in the form of urea and manure. Everyone can agree that improving the environmental sustainability of agriculture is a key outcome, but the priorities and pathways for this still require extensive research and debate.

Finally, we need to discuss social sustainability. This is the most difficult, fluid, and subjective aspect of the sustainability triangle. For example, economies of scale mean that smallholder farmers are not very economically sustainable in that the food they produce must also support a family. This is why as Ag systems modernize you generally see larger farms owned by fewer farmers. Smallholder farming means more expensive food in an environment where we have ~800m people suffering from starvation globally. Is this an acceptable trade off, or is more expensive food OK on a social sustainability basis? Covid has thrown up a few interesting new things in this area, where smaller farmers are direct delivering to consumers at higher prices. So perhaps we will see smallholder farmers providing niche, high quality and price products, with large farms providing most of the global calories.

The social side of food nutrition (as opposed to agriculture) is an even messier subject with lots of ideology (you even have a bizarre situation where carnivore and vegan diet advocates make almost identical health claims), and it continues to amaze how little we still know about the dynamics of nutrition as it relates to an individual. Some believe we should continue our omnivorous habits that got us here, others lean on vegetarianism, some go further to veganism. The majority don’t seem to care either way, and our best food intake advice probably remains Michael Pollan’s “Eat (real) food, mostly plants, not too much”. How to build a social sustainability framework around such a mess?

Consequently, we argue that a future food system should be primarily based on environmental and economic sustainability basis, that seeks to provide for changeable social sustainability needs as best can be done. Some absolutes do exist on social sustainability, in that no one is likely to argue that the people who provide your food should not live actualized lives. Given our increasingly dire global environmental situation, it may make sense to lead with environmental sustainability despite the economic consequences of it (which is loosely what the EU are doing). You can see traditional Ag starting to improve on social sustainability by increasing farm transparency and raising welfare standards. For example, in dairy there are now calf “cuddle boxes” to improve calf welfare and Cainthus just released a commercial Cow Comfort Index that reports on cow wellbeing based on their activity. However, as mentioned previously it is the new entrants who are leading the social sustainability arguments, and traditional Ag needs to utilize technology in order to meet the higher social standards expected by the consumer.

In Conclusion

When considering new or existing agricultural systems and how they might impact sustainability, please think of the trade-offs required to find the truth of its sustainability. The nature of sustainability will change over time. What is unsustainable today may be fully sustainable under different circumstances. Nothing is universally sustainable, there are no cure-alls or silver bullets. We will likely need to take the best of traditional agriculture married to the best new AgTech to provide a future Ag system that is sustainable on all sides of the triangle. We must also accept that there is unlikely to ever be a “finished” sustainable global Ag system. As we introduce new tools, there will be unintended consequences that require fixing and constantly changing human culture and population will require an ag system that can dynamically accommodate changing needs and beliefs. In the meantime, we must do as humans have always done – muddle through things as best we can.