"..farmers in sustainable agriculture are concerned about feeding their families and paying their bills, but those are not their only goals in life. They set out to protect the land, improve their quality of life, and enhance the communities in which they live. Their day-to-day decisions are not guided by a single minded search for profit, but by a delicate balancing act among many goals."

Dick Levins, Land Stewardship Program, Minnesota

• Farmers have multiple goals
   
  
  • family
     
    
  • land
     
    
  • communities
     
    
• Need to find balance among all those goals

The Land Stewardship Program, in White Bear Lake, Minnesota is a nonprofit organization promoting a sustainable, family-farm based system of agriculture. Levins suggests that, since farmers have multiple goals they should have multiple measures of success. He suggests four indicators for sustainable agriculture and has devised a very simple way to measure agricultural sustainability using data from a farmer's tax form.