From vineyards to feedlots: a fund-flow scanning of sociometabolic transition in the Vallès County (Catalonia) 1860–1956–1999

Agroecosystem energy transitions: exploring the energy-land nexus in the course of industrialization

“…The aim of this methodological framework is to analyze agroecosystem energetics throughout the industrialization process, capturing potential shifts from local biomass transfers to external energy inputs. Eight of the empirical articles present case studies in Europe (Fraňková and Cattaneo 2018;Gingrich et al 2018b;Guzmán et al 2018;Marco et al 2018) and the Americas (Cunfer et al 2018;Infante-Amate and Picado 2018;MacFadyen and Watson 2018;Parcerisas and Dupras 2018), and one is a comparative analysis of regional trajectories (Gingrich et al 2018a). Both the methods development and empirical analyses were made possible by a long-term collaboration of the research team.…”

“…An initial hypothesis was that pre-industrial agroecological intensification relied on increasing biomass reused and labor to raise final produce, while agricultural industrialization allowed imported external inputs to replace local biomass reused. This hypothesis was based on insights from Vallés County, Catalonia, Spain, which experienced a very particular trajectory of industrialization (Marco et al 2018;Galán et al 2016;Tello et al 2016). Traditional fertilizing techniques involved the labor-intensive burial of biomass in the soil (Bformiguers^).…”

“…Regions accessible through ocean or riverine shipping, such as Denmark (Henriques and Warde 2018), Catalonia, Spain (Marco et al 2018), and Northern France (Kim et al 2018), or through early railway lines, like the U.S. Great Plains (Cunfer et al 2018), were able to produce agricultural products for international markets and, as in the USA, import fertilizers and fossil fuels already in the nineteenth century. According to the results in this special issue, supraregional market relations impacted the energy profiles of local subsistence agriculture already in the nineteenth century in many places of the world.…”

“…As with all other land management practices, forestry was heavily mechanized during the twentieth century, but compared to other practices of land use, EROIs on woodlands remained rather stable, as demonstrated by the Canadian case studies in Prince Edward Island, where wood extraction dominated agroecosystem management . The degree of forest exploitation made a huge difference in Vallés, Catalonia, Spain, where there was significant reforestation during industrialization but with no impact on EROIs, because wood resources are not presently extracted (Marco et al 2018).…”

Agroecosystem energy transitions in the old and new worlds: trajectories and determinants at the regional scale

“…This study draws on consistent agroecosystem energy flow accounts from seven regional case studies on both sides of the Atlantic at three to five time points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many of which are presented in this Special Issue (Cunfer et al 2017;Gingrich et al 2017;Marco et al 2017;Guzmán and González de Molina 2015).…”