MULTIDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH AND SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

Multidisciplinary research takes many forms, according to how strongly the disciplines interact and whether the purpose is to address a broader question or to get a better answer to the original question. The appropriate type depends on the purpose of the research, such as developing a new technique, identifying farmers' innovations that deserve further attention, evaluating a production system, or discovering principles on which future systems can be based. Although sustainable agriculture has many characteristics that make multidisciplinary research particularly appropriate, this does not rule out an important role for a single-discipline research. Nor does it imply that multidisciplinary approaches are not also suitable for many other research areas. Some people regard multidisciplinarity as essential for sustainable agriculture research because they consider that prevailing scientific thought is too dominated by reductionism and too lacking in imagination to deal with system-level complexities, especially those that seem to defy common sense. However, we can see from the evolution of several areas of physics, including quantum mechanics, relativity theory and statistical mechanics, that even within the confines of a single discipline, scientific thought need not be exclusively reductionist and that it can deal with complex, large-scale phenomena even if their behavior is extremely counterintuitive.