Early energy analyses of agriculture revealed that behind higher labor and land productivity of industrial farming, there was a decrease in energy returns on energy (EROI) invested, in comparison to ...more traditional organic agricultural systems. Studies on recent trends show that efficiency gains in production and use of inputs have again somewhat improved energy returns. However, most of these agricultural energy studies have focused only on external inputs at the crop level, concealing the important role of internal biomass flows that livestock and forestry recirculate within agroecosystems. Here, we synthesize the results of 82 farm systems in North America and Europe from 1830 to 2012 that for the first time show the changing energy profiles of agroecosystems, including livestock and forestry, with a multi-EROI approach that accounts for the energy returns on external inputs, on internal biomass reuses, and on all inputs invested. With this historical circular bioeconomic approach, we found a general trend towards much lower external returns, little or no increases in internal returns, and almost no improvement in total returns. This “energy trap” was driven by shifts towards a growing dependence of crop production on fossil-fueled external inputs, much more intensive livestock production based on feed grains, less forestry, and a structural disintegration of agroecosystem components by increasingly linear industrial farm managements. We conclude that overcoming the energy trap requires nature-based solutions to reduce current dependence on fossil-fueled external industrial inputs and increase the circularity and complexity of agroecosystems to provide healthier diets with less animal products.
In contrast to most long-settled agricultural landscapes, the US Great Plains presents a rare example of well-documented agricultural colonization of new land. The Census of Agriculture provides ...detailed information about evolving grassland farm systems from the beginning of agricultural expansion and then at some two dozen time points between 1880 and the present. From early sod-busting, through drought and depression, and into late-twentieth-century modernization, it is possible to track how farmers used their land in any county. Treating farmland as an agroecosystem, a hybrid human-natural landscape, this article asks how farmers captured, altered, and replenished soil fertility. Did they extract more soil nitrogen than they returned, or did they maintain a balance? The article assesses land use from a soil nutrients perspective in several plains environments to capture variation in climate (especially rainfall), native soil quality, and availability of irrigation water. It traces farm management strategies through time to understand agricultural crises, growth periods, and technological transitions in the context of soil fertility. Soil management on an agricultural frontier was markedly different from that in places that had been farmed for centuries. A shortage of people and livestock and an abundance of deep, rich soils in the plains informed farmers’ calculations as they juggled labor, capital, and market forces against family and financial strategies. Uniform methods of estimating and representing soil nutrient processes make possible a direct comparison of the relative sustainability of historical agroecosystems.
The near disappearance of the American bison in the nineteenth century is commonly understood to be the result of over-hunting, capitalist greed, and all but genocidal military policy. This ...interpretation remains seductive because of its simplicity; there are villains and victims in this familiar cautionary tale of the American frontier. But as this volume of groundbreaking scholarship shows, the story of the bison’s demise is actually quite nuanced. Bison and People on the North American Great Plains brings together voices from several disciplines to offer new insights on the relationship between humans and animals that approached extinction. The essays here transcend the border between the United States and Canada to provide a continental context. Contributors include historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, and Native American perspectives. This book explores the deep past and examines the latest knowledge on bison anatomy and physiology, how bison responded to climate change (especially drought), and early bison hunters and pre-contact trade. It also focuses on the era of European contact, in particular the arrival of the horse, and some of the first known instances of over-hunting. By the nineteenth century bison reached a “tipping point” as a result of new tanning practices, an early attempt at protective legislation, and ventures to introducing cattle as a replacement stock. The book concludes with a Lakota perspective featuring new ethnohistorical research. Bison and People on the North American Great Plains is a major contribution to environmental history, western history, and the growing field of transnational history.
Farmers in different places employed various techniques to manage soil nutrients, and the articles in this special issue of Social Science History present case studies from Austria, Spain, and ...Portugal in Europe, and from Canada and the United States in North America. Most of these articles originated with an international, interdisciplinary research project entitled “Sustainable Farm Systems: Long-Term Socio-Ecological Metabolism in Western Agriculture,” funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and with significant matching contributions from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education and the Austrian Science Fund. That project borrowed “socio-ecological metabolism” and “material and energy flow accounting” methods from sustainability science (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007; González de Molina and Toledo 2014; Singh et al. 2013) and applied them to explore interesting environmental and economic history questions. The soil nutrient balance methods underlying many of the articles in this special issue originated with Dr. Roberto García-Ruiz, a soil scientist who visited several of the research teams and helped them adapt nutrient balance methods to historical case studies (García-Ruiz et al. 2012). This special issue would have been impossible without his generous contributions. While many publications from the Sustainable Farm Systems project appeared in sustainability science journals (Aguilera et al. 2018; Delgadillo et al. 2016; Gingrich et al. 2015; Giziki-Neundlinger and Güldner 2017; González de Molina et al. 2015; Güldner and Krausmann 2017; Tello et al. 2012), here we aim to make this work accessible for historians.
From LTER to LTSER Haberl, Helmut; Winiwarter, Verena; Andersson, Krister ...
Ecology and society,
12/2006, Letnik:
11, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Concerns about global environmental change challenge long term ecological research (LTER) to go beyond traditional disciplinary scientific research to produce knowledge that can guide society toward ...more sustainable development. Reporting the outcomes of a 2 d interdisciplinary workshop, this article proposes novel concepts to substantially expand LTER by including the human dimension. We feel that such an integration warrants the insertion of a new letter in the acronym, changing it from LTER to LTSER, “Long-Term Socioecological Research,” with a focus on coupled socioecological systems. We discuss scientific challenges such as the necessity to link biophysical processes to governance and communication, the need to consider patterns and processes across several spatial and temporal scales, and the difficulties of combining data from in-situ measurements with statistical data, cadastral surveys, and soft knowledge from the humanities. We stress the importance of including prefossil fuel system baseline data as well as maintaining the often delicate balance between monitoring and predictive or explanatory modeling. Moreover, it is challenging to organize a continuous process of cross-fertilization between rich descriptive and causal-analytic local case studies and theory/modeling-oriented generalizations. Conceptual insights are used to derive conclusions for the design of infrastructures needed for long-term socioecological research.
Systematic evaluation of agricultural settlements on the Great Plains, employing census data and socio-ecological metabolism methods drawn from sustainability science and agro-ecology, reveals that ...farmers, driven by personal ambition and national incentives, not only changed their environment; they also adjusted to it in more ways than previously supposed. The "socio-ecological profiles" used in this analysis of the Great Plains are applicable to any agricultural region where governments collected the requisite census data.
Agro-ecosystem energy profiles reveal energy flows into, within, and out of US Great Plains farm communities across 140 years. This study evaluates external energy inputs such as human labor, ...machinery, fuel, and fertilizers. It tracks the energy content of land produce, including crops, grazed pasture, and firewood, and also accounts unharvested energy that remains available for wildlife. It estimates energy redirected through livestock feed into draft power, meat, and milk, and estimates the energy content of final produce available for local consumption or market sale. The article presents energy profiles for three case studies in Kansas in 1880, 1930, 1954, and 1997. Two energy transformations occurred during that time. The first,
agricultural colonization
, saw farm communities remake the landscape, turning native grassland into a mosaic of cropland and pasture, a process that reduced overall landscape energy productivity. A second energy transition occurred in the mid-twentieth century, characterized by fossil fuel energy imports. That outside energy raised harvested and unharvested energy flows, reused biomass energy, and also final produce. This
socio-ecological transition
increased landscape energy productivity by 33 to 45% above presettlement conditions in grain-growing regions. These energy developments were not uniform across the plains. Variations in rainfall and soil quality constrained or favored energy productivity in different places. The case studies reveal the spatial variation of energy profiles in Great Plains agro-ecosystems, while the longitudinal approach tracks temporal change.
We present an energy analysis of past and present farm systems aimed to contribute to their sustainability assessment. Looking at agroecosystems as a set of energy loops between nature and society, ...and adopting a farm-operator standpoint at landscape level to set the system boundaries, enthalpy values of energy carriers are accounted for net Final Produce going outside as well as for Biomass Reused cycling inside, and External Inputs are accounted using embodied values. Human Labour is accounted for the fraction of the energy intake of labouring people devoted to perform farm work, considering the local or external origin of their food basket. In this approach the proportion of internal Biomass Reused becomes a hallmark of organic farm systems that tend to save External Inputs, whereas industrial farming and livestock breeding in feedlots tend to get rid of reuses replacing them with inputs coming from outside. Hence, decomposing the internal or external energy throughputs may bring to light their contrasting sociometabolic profiles. A Catalan case study in 1860 and 1990 is used as a test bench to show how revealing this decomposing analysis may be to plot the energy profiles of farm systems and their possible improvement pathways.
•Organic farming tends to save external inputs relying on internal reuses, industrial ones replace them with external inputs.•Decomposing energy yields into internal and external returns discloses the diverse sociometabolic profiles of farm systems.•Internal flows of biomass reused, with an integrated land-use management, increase agroecosystem’s complexity and services.
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