Preface...
It was my privilege to help establish the LISA sustainable agriculture
competitive grants program and its successors, SARE and ACE. (These acronyms
are defined in the glossary.) Others who played important roles include
George Bird, Brian Chabot, Senator Tom Daschel, John Haberern, Chuck Hassebrook,
Ferd Hoefner, Dixon Hubbard, Fred Kirschenmann, Chuck Laughlin, Senator
Patrick Leahy, Fred Magdoff, Kathleen Merrigan, Paul O'Connell, Bob Rodale,
Neill Schaller, Sandy Schlecker, David Schlegel, Karl Stauber, Steve Waller,
and Garth Youngberg, among many others. However, the real heroes are the
hundreds of farmers, scientists, and educators who are developing and promoting
more sustainable farming systems.
This account of the early years of the national sustainable agriculture
research and education programs was prepared initially in 1995, under a
contract between the SARE Program and the World Sustainable Agriculture
Association, of which I was then President. The contract called for examination
of the documents contained in multiple file cabinets accumulated during
my almost seven years with the Program. The current version has benefited
greatly from corrections and recommendations offered by reviewers, especially
Jill Auburn, Paula Ford, Neill Schaller, David Schlegel, and Steve Waller.
I view this personal account as an archive for historians (of which
I am not one) who may wish to compile a truly comprehensive history of
the Program at some future date. This effort would require gleaning information
from files left by my colleagues and myself, and by correlating information
from other sources. Therefore the reader should view this document merely
as archival material, not as a complete and exhaustive history of the SARE
and ACE Programs and their predecessor, the LISA Program.
No report of this kind is ever completely "objective". The best an author
can do is to be explicit where interpretive judgments are rendered, and
to provide the reader with a basis for understanding the positions taken
by the author. In preparing this document, I have endeavored to stick closely
to the facts as revealed in selected letters, notes, and other documents
in my files. Nonetheless, many personal opinions are clearly evident to
the discerning reader. The selection criterion I used for inclusion of
materials in this report was the potential contribution to future sustainable
agriculture efforts. A brief autobiographical summary is included in the
Appendix, as an aid to understanding the author's perspective.
I have deeply appreciated the opportunity to help establish and shape
the LISA, ACE and SARE. May they prove to be "sustainable".
J. Patrick Madden
May 1998
