Agricultural system models play increasingly important roles in creating sustainable agriculture businesses across diverse agro-ecological and socio-economic conditions. Agricultural system models are being used for various types of landscape-scale, national, and global modeling and analysis. Models provide information to land managers, policymakers, and the general public that inform management practices, public policy design, research and development, and investment decisions in order to maximize sustainability goals.

Learners will use models as "thinking tools" to inform strategy by looking at how different variables in different magnitudes and times affect outcomes in specific contexts. Understanding and using models are preferred versus field and farm experiments that require large amounts of resources and may still not provide sufficient information to identify appropriate and effective management practices.

This course will explain how manipulation of a sustainable agriculture model helps learners focus onagriculturalsystems as a whole and understand the multiple variables that interact within that system to achieve economic and sustainability outcomes