Agroecology is the science of sustainable agriculture; the methods of agroecology have as their goal achieving sustainability of agricultural systems balanced in all spheres. This includes the socio-economic and the ecological or environmental.

While farming methods vary, traditional manipulated "agroecosystems" generally differ from natural ecosystems in six ways: maintenance at an early successional state, monoculture, crops generally planted in rows, simplification of biodiversity, plough which exposes soil to erosion, use of genetically modified organisms and artificially selected crops meanwhile agroecology tends to minimize the human impact. The agroecologist views any farming system primarily with an ecologist's eye; that is, it is not firstly economic (created for a commodity and profit), nor industrial (modeled after a factory).