Balancing productivity, profitability, and environmental health is a key challenge for agricultural sustainability. Most crop production systems in the United States are characterized by low species and management diversity, high use of fossil energy and agrichemicals, and large negative impacts on the environment. We hypothesized that cropping system diversification would promote ecosystem services that would supplement, and eventually displace, synthetic external inputs used to maintain crop productivity.

Agriculture has intensified over the last 50 years resulting in increased usage of fertilizers and agrochemicals, changes in cropping practices, land drainage and increased stocking rates. In Europe, this has resulted in declines in the quality of soils and waters due to increased run off and water pollution. Fifty percent of nitrates in European rivers are derived from agricultural sources and in the UK this value is as high as 70 %, where agriculture also contributes to approximately 28 % of phosphates and 76 % of sediments recorded in rivers.

The agriculture sector has gone through different phases of growth, embracing a wide variety of institutional interventions, and technology and policy regimes. From the late 1960s onwards, the green revolution helped the sector maintain steady growth for more than two decades. But the challenges that swept through the economy in the 1990s after the initiation of economic reforms arrested this growth. Conscious efforts have brought about a recovery of growth since the middle of the first decade of the 2000s.

Numerous reports have emphasized the need for major changes in the global food system: agriculture must meet the twin challenge of feeding a growing population, with rising demand for meat and high-calorie diets, while simultaneously minimizing its global environmental impacts. Organic farming—a system aimed at producing food with minimal harm to ecosystems, animals or humans—is often proposed as a solution.

Given that the controversy over success and failure of Bt technology still exists, this paper discusses the available field studies that have addressed agro-economic questions of Bt cotton cultivation in India. Since a meta-analysis of studies can give only partial conclusions, owing to differences across study methodologies and coverage, this paper takes a different strategy, i e, looking not simply at differences between Bt farms and non-Bt farms, but at the experience of farmers before growing Bt and after switching to Bt.