Sustainability is a difficult concept to pin down, but for our purposes we define arable sustainability as the ability of a system to maintain stable levels of food production and quality in the long-term without escalating requirements for agro-chemical inputs to regulate the system.

For an arable system to be sustainable (in this ecological sense), the within-field arable habitat should be able to support stable populations of a range of organisms that regulate key system processes (primary production, nutrient cycling, decomposition, predation and pollination).

Management for arable sustainability must therefore allow coexistence of different functional groups of plants and animals, and the use of crop varieties that can tolerate a degree of weed, pest and disease pressure while still producing good quality yield.