Sustainable agriculture can be understood as an ecosystem approach to agriculture. Practices that can cause long-term damage to soil include excessive tilling of the soil (leading to erosion) and irrigation without adequate drainage (leading to salinisation). Long-term experiments have provided some of the best data on how various practices affect soil properties essential to sustainability.

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The most important factors for an individual site are climate, soil, nutrients, and water. Of the four, water and soil quality and quantity are most amenable to human intervention through time and labor. When farmers grow and harvest crops, they remove some nutrients from the soil. Without replenishment, land suffers from nutrient depletion and becomes either unusable or suffers from reduced yields. Sustainable agriculture depends on replenishing the soil while minimizing the use or need of non-renewable resources, such as natural gas (used in converting atmospheric nitrogen into synthetic fertilizer), or mineral ores (e.g., phosphate).

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Sustainable farming is a growing practice that is vital to the health and welfare of our planet. While modern industrial agriculture is highly productive and can produce a massive amount of plants within a harvest season, it also introduces many damaging and long-term problems that can only be solved through sustainable practices.