Agriculture has enabled human populations to dominate the world’s landscapes for many thousands of years, and the science of agriculture has been continually refined over time to accommodate the food requirements of the ever-increasing human population and the changing natural environment. Until recent centuries, productive crops were mostly organic and existed with some permanence as part of a landscape. As communities have urbanized and modernized, less land has become available for food production, and biodiversity within farming systems has diminished. Food insecurity caused by rapid population growth has pressured science to produce techniques to maximize livestock and plant production for human use. Many international and regional instruments and national laws, policies, approaches and practices exist today to help achieve sustainable agriculture. To adjust to the exponential trends of our population without compromising the integrity of the environment, a global transition by adopting new laws and policies or reforming existing laws and policies to enable sustainable agriculture is necessary. However, the increase in agricultural production over the last century has seen an increase in soil and land degradation, undermining the security of soil and its ability to produce sufficient food and achieve the sustainability of agriculture. By examining how various land use decisions affect the ‘sustainability’ of agriculture, existing laws and policies can be used more effectively to protect the agricultural environment and the welfare of people, new or reformed laws and policies could be enacted.