Agricultural Output: From Crop Specialization to Livestocking, 1900–2008

Abstract

In this chapter, we review the animal and vegetal biomass flows of Spanish agroecosystems based on the evolution of net primary productivity, its different components and livestock production. This enables us to examine the performance of biophysical, land and livestock fund elements as well as the changes that took place throughout the twentieth century to meet society's biomass requirements. As explained in the introduction, our analysis moves away from the standard narrative on Spain's agricultural sector and its contribution to economic growth. A historiographic review of the main transformations in Spanish agriculture since 1900s was, however, presented in the first section of this chapter. Based on both traditional discourse and new historiographical contributions, we determine the milestones of change and then submit them to the discussion. The following sections aim at laying the foundations of an alternative narrative based on the study of Spanish agroecosystem productivity since 1900. The second section is dedicated to changes in types of land use since 1900 until now. We discuss whether Spain's evolution really did follow the so-called forest transition and its associated theory of productive intensification. We later analyze the NPP of agroecosystems, breaking it down into categories to verify whether production efforts affected their health. We then center on the domestic extraction entity over time and its progressive concentration in cultivated lands. Subsequently, we focus on these lands' specialization in specific Mediterranean crops oriented towards both national and international markets. Next, we turn our attention to livestock, a critical activity in recent decades, focusing first on its evolution before examining livestock production. To finish, we propose a holistic understanding of the biophysical implications of the sector's industrialization.