At the farm scale, if the objective is to return a site to some historical condition, the context of contemporary land use is largely ignored. In this case conservation and primary production will always be set up as conflicting interests. However, setting goals that are compatible with current or proposed land use will ensure that biodiversity and production goals can be integrated.

In this section, we promote the concept that the benefits of biodiversity to primary production are largely dependent on the maintenance of ecosystem processes that can ensure both long-term landscape viability and long-term agricultural production. Goals for integrating biodiversity and production should therefore focus on restoring or maintaining the viability of native species and plant communities that support these ecosystem processes, rather than on restoring plant community composition in some historical sense. Thus, agricultural practices should seek to maintain, for example, vital ecological processes such as nutrient cycling. Since the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem processes assumes some capacity for self-design landscapes in which these processes are maintained should have greater resilience and capacity to respond to predicted climate changes. The following sections evaluate examples of key management practices that may achieve these goals.