Agriculture Sustainability: A California Agribusiness Students’ Perspective

Abstract

Agribusiness managers as the major players in the agricultural industry greatly determine agribusiness practices and affectperception about agricultural sustainability. This study develops a framework to analyze how agribusiness students, the future agribusiness managers, in California view sustainable agriculture. An educational program was created and implemented to raise awareness and educate students about agricultural sustainability. Pre-and post-surveys were administered to collect relevant data and a conditional logit model was estimated. Our main results suggest that: 1) the educational program is more influential on the ratings of the external social and environmental sustainability than on economic and internal social sustainability; 2) participating in the educational program helped future managers realize the importance of obtaining stable income to achieve economic sustainability; and 3) water quality and farm continuity are important attributes infarm environmental and internal social sustainability. Given the lack of consensus on how to define agricultural sustainability, this study provides insightful information to help understand how future agriculture managers perceive sustainable farming.