Beyond the Yield: Enhancing Agricultural Sustainability Through Operations Management

Abstract

Historical records indicate that the collapse of many ancient civilizations, such as those of the Sumer, the Mayans, the Indus Valley, and Rome, was partly driven by the failure of agricultural systems (Diamond 2011; Raman 2024). Many modern farming systems around the globe are potentially approaching similar failures as they struggle with critical challenges such as changing climate or soil biodiversity loss, pressures to reduce costs, new technologies, and infectious diseases or pest outbreaks such as avian bird-flu (Caserta et al. 2024; Chen and Chen 2021; Cinner et al. 2022; Guo et al. 2022; Shi (Junmin) et al. 2019).

Agriculture remains essential to the continuity and stability of human civilization. Recognizing its central role, the United Nations has designated ending hunger and achieving food security as a core Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 2). Yet competing pressures to increase agricultural output and lower costs are more often than not in conflict with constraints on natural resources, which have led to major challenges for agricultural supply chains and the environment, its labor force (e.g., increased exploitation, migration), and animals in the system (Howard and Forin 2019; Rossi and Garner 2014; Wiengarten and Durach 2021; Yang et al. 2024). Furthermore, these conflicts have been exacerbated by power imbalances between large markets and small suppliers, and because the degradation of agricultural regions has taken a proportionally greater toll on less well-developed economies (Gómez and Lee 2023).

Scholarly attention to production systems within the agricultural economics domain has a long history (Le Gal et al. 2011). In recent years, researchers in this field have focused increasingly on identifying more sustainable methods of agricultural production (e.g., Campi et al. 2021; Christiaensen et al. 2021; Giller et al. 2021; Jayne and Sanchez 2021; Rehman et al. 2022; Touch et al. 2024). This has sought, for example, more efficient, less impactful, or technology-driven methods of production that improve yield and reduce harm. These topics are very much in the wheelhouse of the operations management (OM) discipline, yet contributions from OM researchers that explore within, or offer solutions to agricultural systems, have been limited. Given OM's foundational focus on production processes and systems, however, our field is uniquely positioned to meaningfully address the challenges currently facing global agricultural production systems.

In the present paper, we recognize and reflect on this gap in OM in order to provide a foundation for the special issue (SI) on sustainable agriculture. The goal of the SI was to achieve two key objectives: (i) raise awareness within the OM community of pressing challenges in agricultural production systems, and (ii) offer a springboard for future research. The SI call for papers resulted in 55 submissions, with two papers ultimately published (and briefly introduced below). This low conversion rate underscored the challenges that OM scholars encounter when conducting research on agricultural production systems, such as issues with data validity, access to informants, geography, and the generally resource-intensive nature of fieldwork in agricultural settings. Nevertheless, the two papers published through the SI met these challenges and provide strong examples of research that demonstrates the capacity of OM to address questions relevant to agricultural production systems. We hope that these papers and the editorial spur more research in this critical area.

We introduce the two SI papers by first providing a review of existing and future OM research themes relevant to sustainable agricultural production. We describe the systemic problems that currently confront industrial agricultural systems and that impinge on their ability to remain sustainable in the long term. This prefaces our discussion of alternative approaches to agricultural production along with its promises and challenges. To do this, and to understand the OM perspective on sustainable agriculture, we summarize relevant studies published in major OM journals in the last 10 years. Furthermore, we propose seven research areas for future inquiry and deliberately focus on the upstream segment of the agricultural supply chain, which includes mainly primary agricultural production, such as farming and the initial processing of food (incl. animals), feed, and fiber. This segment of the agricultural supply chain is closely tied to the land. We acknowledge that the broader agribusiness landscape extends far beyond farmland, including downstream activities such as secondary processing, packaging, distribution, and retail. A distinctive feature of agricultural supply chains compared to other types of supply chains, however, is that this upstream segment is uniquely constrained by geography and natural resources. It relies heavily on scarce natural resources such as land, soil, and water, which makes it prone to environmental and social challenges arising from overuse or unconstrained agricultural production activity (Forssell and Lankoski 2015). These environmental and social constraints make agricultural production an ideal context for extending our understanding of OM principles.

OM research is well placed to help shift agricultural production systems from an efficiency-oriented, industrial paradigm of large-scale factory farming toward a more sustainable model that better addresses the needs of all its stakeholders. These stakeholders go beyond large corporate buyers and their shareholders to include farmers, their supply chain partners, policymakers, communities, and of course, the earth as a system.

The upstream supply chain of agricultural production systems is characterized by considerable complexity, largely due to the diverse range of inputs required for farming and the complexities of its operations (Borodin et al. 2016; Cumming et al. 2014; Roth and Zheng 2021). These inputs include those that are transformed in some way to become the output, such as breeding stock, fish stock, plants, seeds, and those used to perform the transformation process, such as animal feed, farm equipment, fertilizers, fuels, plant and pest control, and veterinary drugs (e.g., antibiotics and steroids). Beyond these physical input goods, services also play a pivotal role, including financing, farm leasing and management, veterinary care, building and equipment maintenance, soil and water testing, agricultural extension services, and various audit and certification requirements. The availability of reliable infrastructure such as storage facilities and on-site maintenance capabilities is also essential.

Among this, are also the complex and often imbalanced relationships that exist between different parties in agricultural supply chains. Many agricultural supply chains are characterized by large power gaps between its members (Touboulic et al. 2014). Farmers have to bear risks related to yield and climate change and price volatilities of input materials and their products. Whilst at the same time buyers become larger and more powerful. Geopolitical and climate risk only escalate these power imbalances that in many cases lead to exploitations of the land, humans, and livestock.

Adding further complexity, certifications have grown to become an industry of their own (e.g., organic, non-genetically-modified-organisms, humanely raised livestock) and supply chains and industries have mandated strict adherence to a range of standards. These certifications not only shape production practices but also serve as governance mechanisms influencing supplier relationships and sustainability efforts across multi-tier supply chains (Villena and Gioia 2018; Wilhelm and Villena 2021). However, the implementation and transfer of sustainable agricultural practices remain uneven, often influenced by structural dynamics, buyer influence, and first-tier supplier roles (Jamalnia et al. 2023). As sustainability concerns intensify, understanding how these practices emerge, evolve, and diffuse across supply chain tiers becomes crucial for both researchers and practitioners. A critical foundation of these agricultural systems, of course, is the natural, often finite and in some cases declining resources that they depend on. These include biodiverse soil, clean water, clean air, and energy. That these natural resources are both essential to and most at risk of degradation from exploitation and misuse is one of the major tensions of agricultural production systems. As a result, efficiency becomes a far more challenging goal for agricultural systems than it would be for other types of production. Industrial agriculture has emerged as one response to this challenge, offering solutions to global food production needs, yet it has also faced growing criticism.

In the following, we combine our observations from the existing literature on OM in agriculture with our review of existing OM research on agriculture to offer what we think can be a fertile ground for future research in our domain. In addition, we perceive this tension as one between what OM principles can bring to the productivity and management of systems constrained by nature such as agriculture, as well as how these sorts of systems allow us to evolve our understanding through the research context. We capture these two goals for future OM research in agricultural production systems as research that contributes to our discipline and agricultural production by either: a. advancing and extending OM theory by contextualizing its use within the constraints of agricultural production, or b. transforming agricultural production at a system level through the use of OM principles. These goals are similar to those advocated by the National Academy of Sciences (2021) in which they recommend that both incremental and transformative shifts in economic and operational paradigms are needed if we are to properly address the sustainability of our agricultural systems.

This broadens the dialogue between supply chain operations and agriculture, enabling a two-way exchange of understanding rather than the current one-sided approach, where OM tends to impose its principles on systems—particularly those in agriculture that are environmentally and socially constrained, often overlooking underlying tensions. We discuss these goals—advance more sustainable productivity and transform OM principles—below (summarized in Figure 1).

With this editorial and the associated SI papers, we hope to encourage the OM community to engage more deeply with agricultural systems, where opportunities for meaningful contributions are both pressing and plentiful. Our emphasis here was on upstream agriculture operations, though we believe it is equally important for OM research to engage with downstream processes. Overall, we see ample opportunities for OM scholars to contribute and provide valuable insights toward shaping agriculture into a system that is capable of meeting the world's growing needs for food, feed, and fiber with minimal harm to the environment, people, and animals. By leveraging knowledge of processes, technologies, and human factors, OM researchers are well positioned to address key challenges at the intersection of farming operations, system design, and public policy.