Agriculture plays a central role in sustainable development. Its fundamental position as the supplier of human nutrition shapes the global economy and society’s relationship with the natural world. It is thus central to achieving a suite of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed to by the United Nations in 2015 (United Nations, 2015), ranging from ending hunger and poverty, to improving human well-being and reducing environmental impacts (United Nations Economic and Social Council, 2016). Already, over a third of the world’s land surface and nearly three quarters of its freshwater resources are devoted to agriculture (Dobermann et al., 2013; HLPE, 2013; Pretty et al., 2006). It is both an important driver of global climate change, as a result of land-use change and greenhouse gas emissions (Smith et al., 2014), and one of the sectors most vulnerable to its impacts (Vermeulen et al., 2012). Moreover, approximately three quarters of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas, where farming is the main source of employment and income (World Bank, 2007; IFAD, 2011). With growing global population and affluence, the pressure on agricultural and natural systems increases. As a result of these growing pressures, humans now expect agriculture to supply not only nutritious food but also employment, energy resources, clean water, biodiversity conservation and more. This situation makes it essential to navigate and manage the trade-offs between potential benefits and negative impacts that can arise as food production interacts with other aspects of sustainable agricultural systems (Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005; Tilman et al., 2009; Godfray et al., 2010; Tilman and Clark, 2014). Concepts such as sustainable agricultural intensification (Garnett and Godfray, 2012) and climate-smart agriculture (Lipper et al., 2014) are rallying cries to the challenge of achieving the multiple goals of increasing agricultural productivity and rural livelihoods while minimizing negative environmental effects. As pointed out by Garnett and Godfray (2012), sustainable agricultural intensification is not a particular set of practices but instead provides a conceptual framework for guiding discussions on achieving balanced outcomes of intensification. Thus, there can be multiple alternative pathways to sustainable agricultural systems whose suitability and outcomes vary depending on agroecological zone, farming system, cultural preferences, institutions and policies, among other factors. Each of these pathways results in a different suite and/or degree of environment and socioeconomic trade-offs and synergies that must be recognized and addressed. The successful transformation of the agricultural sector to meet these multiple goals, therefore, requires the ability to track multiple outcomes, assess whether identified goals are being met or compromised, and allow for guided course corrections. In an effort to make these interactions explicit, trade-off analysis for agricultural systems has emerged as an increasingly important field of study. This paper attempts to synthesize the central components of the literature on agricultural trade-off analysis and provide guidance on next steps for research in this area. Trade-off analysis developed out of cost-benefit-analysis (CBA) and was first applied to agriculture during the Green Revolution in the 1970s to evaluate the economic impacts of emerging agricultural technologies (Alston et al., 1995).