ASABE Technical Library - Abstract

Abstract. Guatemala is a country characterised by extreme spatial variability, combining an enormous diversity of climates, geographies, and agroecosystems within a very small geographical scale, which complicates the development of sustainable agroecosystem design. Adding to this complexity has been the promotion of two very different rural agricultural development paradigms for smallholder farming communities: market-based commercialisation versus low-input subsistence-based approaches. In the case of the former, communities have turned to high-input, high-output agricultural systems based on a cash economy, while, in that of the latter, other communities have adopted a low-input, organic-style management system. The opposing nature of the two approaches, combined with increasing pest pressures as well as climate extremes and climate changes, makes the development of methods for the analysis and design of these agroecosystems' sustainability of paramount urgency.

Unfortunately, methods for assessing the ecological sustainability of agroecosystems have centered either on indicator-based approaches or large-scope qualitative ecosystem network (pest and beneficial organism) evaluations and have been lacking in mechanistic rigour and quantifiability, respectively. In this research we present a method for the participatory development of agroecosystem network models with stakeholder communities, which allows us to simplify these complex networks and compare agroecological networks in both a high-input a low-input setting. The participatory method was designed for effective and rapid application in low-resource settings where time and resource-intensive identification of all insects present is not feasible. The results suggest that the low-input agroecosystem has structural trophic characteristics promoting a more resilient and stable agroecological system.