Energy Inefficiency In Industrial Agriculture: You Are What You Eat

Acker, Thomas L.; Atwater, Chelsea; Smith, Dean Howard

doi:10.1080/15567249.2010.485168

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Both the LCRP and the PPAMA (Figure 1) consist of croplands that are large suppliers of lettuce, alfalfa, cotton, cauliflower, and broccoli [22]. The LCRP is classified as a hot and arid desert with mean annual temperatures of 24.6 • C and mean annual precipitation of 108.1 mm, whereas the PPAMA is classified as a hot desert steppe with mean annual temperatures of 22.3 • C and mean annual precipitation of 270.7 mm (Figure S1).…”

Section: Study Area and Regional Water Rightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate and Socioeconomic Factors Drive Irrigated Agriculture Dynamics in the Lower Colorado River Basin

et al. 2021

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The Colorado River Basin (CRB) includes seven states and provides municipal and industrial water to millions of people across all major southwestern cities both inside and outside the basin. Agriculture is the largest part of the CRB economy and crop production depends on irrigation, which accounts for about 74% of the total water demand cross the region. A better understanding of irrigation water demands is critically needed as temperatures continue to rise and drought intensifies, potentially leading to water shortages across the region. Yet, past research on irrigation dynamics has generally utilized relatively low spatiotemporal resolution datasets and has often overlooked the relationship between climate and management decisions such as land fallowing, i.e., the practice of leaving cultivated land idle for a growing season. Here, we produced annual estimates of fallow and active cropland extent at high spatial resolution (30 m) from 2001 to 2017 by applying the fallow-land algorithm based on neighborhood and temporal anomalies (FANTA). We specifically focused on diverse CRB agricultural regions: the lower Colorado River planning (LCRP) area and the Pinal and Phoenix active management areas (PPAMA). Utilizing ground observations collected in 2014 and 2017, we found an overall classification accuracy of 88.9% and 87.2% for LCRP and PPAMA, respectively. We then quantified how factors such as climate, district water rights, and market value influenced: (1) annual fallow and active cropland extent and (2) annual cropland productivity, approximated by integrated growing season NDVI (iNDVI). We found that for the LCRP, a region of winter cropping and senior (i.e., preferential) water rights, active cropland productivity was positively correlated with cool-season average vapor pressure deficit (R = 0.72; p < 0.01). By contrast, for the PPAMA, a region of summer cropping and junior water rights, annual fallow and active cropland extent was positively correlated with cool-season aridity (precipitation/potential evapotranspiration) (R = 0.46; p < 0.05), and active cropland productivity was positively correlated with warm-season aridity (precipitation/potential evapotranspiration) (R = 0.42; p < 0.01). We also found that PPAMA cropland productivity was more sensitive to aridity when crop prices were low, potentially due to the influence of market value on management decisions. Our analysis highlights how biophysical (e.g., temperature and precipitation) and socioeconomic (e.g., water rights and crop market value) factors interact to explain seasonal patterns of cropland extent, water use and productivity. These findings indicate that increasing aridity across the region may result in reduced cropland productivity and increased land fallowing for some regions, particularly those with junior water rights.

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Section: Study Area and Regional Water Rightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate and Socioeconomic Factors Drive Irrigated Agriculture Dynamics in the Lower Colorado River Basin

et al. 2021

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“…Acker et al (2013) studied food production systems in Arizona and concluded that these are highly energy and water intensive operations. The authors suggested that the environmental, ecological and social justice issues of modern industrial agriculture require a reassessment of how food systems are organised nowadays, including farm subsidies, consumer demand and preferences, engineering technologies, and water policy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Concepts for further sustainable production of foods

Goot¹,

Pelgrom²,

Berghout³

et al. 2016

Journal of Food Engineering

206

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“…and considerably more than this for globally sourced fresh fruit 76. Any epoch-making extension of this model today will depend on locating new sources of cheap energy that not only replace declining supply zones but significantly expand those sources.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology

Moore

2015

Critical Historical Studies

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Capitalism, understood as a world-ecology that joins accumulation, power, and nature in dialectical unity, has been adept at evading so-called Malthusian dynamics through an astonishing historical capacity to produce, locate, and occupy cheap natures external to the system. In recent decades, the last frontiers have closed, and this astonishing historical capacity has withered. This "withering" is perhaps most evident in capitalism's failure to offer a new, actually productive, agricultural model-as agrobiotechnology failed to deliver on its promissory notes. Moving from bad to worse, a second set of contradictions is now mediated through climate change. Climate change, one among many ongoing biospheric shifts, is interwoven with the totality of neoliberal agriculture's contradictions to produce a new contradiction: negative value. This signals the emergence of forms of nature that are increasingly hostile to capital accumulation and that can be temporarily fixed (if at all) only through increasingly costly, toxic, and dangerous strategies. The rise of negative value-whose accumulation has been latent for much of capitalist history-therefore suggests a significant and rapid erosion of opportunities for the appropriation of new streams of unpaid work/energy. As such, these new limits are qualitatively different from the nutrient and resource depletion of earlier, developmental crises of the longue dure´e Cheap Food model. These contradictions, within capital, arising from negative value, are today encouraging an unprecedented shift toward a radical ontological politics, within Special thanks to William H. Sewell Jr.

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Energy Inefficiency In Industrial Agriculture: You Are What You Eat

Cited by 5 publications

References 2 publications

Climate and Socioeconomic Factors Drive Irrigated Agriculture Dynamics in the Lower Colorado River Basin

Climate and Socioeconomic Factors Drive Irrigated Agriculture Dynamics in the Lower Colorado River Basin

Concepts for further sustainable production of foods

Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology

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