Sustainable agriculture has been defined as the ability of a productive system to maintain its productivity over long periods of time without severe or permanent degradation of land resources or ecosystems.
Sustainable agriculture depends largely on a correct use of natural resources.
Ecological constraints must be carefully assessed on the basis of selected spatial units. The main assumption is that a spatial perspective contributes to the merging of scientific and traditional knowledge in order to arrive at sustainable agriculture at the rural community level. The test case for this assumption may well be the community of Nuevo San Juan in Central Mexico, which is highlighted in the article. Up to now, most of the technical work has been aimed exclusively at land use planners, administrators and politicians. In land evaluation, the microspatial scale has been neglected in favour of the regional and national.