Organic farming in the past and today: sociometabolic perspective on a Central European case study

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

“…That finding is also surprising, given that the distinction between internal versus external energy inputs depends on the size of the case study. At the farm scale in Holubi Zhor, Czech Republic, IFEROI in 2012 was 3.4, higher than the national-level IFEROI of Spain, which was 0.72 in 2008 (Fraňková and Cattaneo 2018;Guzmán et al 2018). This would confirm the general idea that ceteris paribus, a larger agroecosystem relies on more internal inputs per unit of final produce than a smaller one.…”

“…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.…”

“…Industrialization did increase external inputs everywhere, but biomass reused remained stable or even grew in many case studies. In some of the case studies, there was a slight decline of local (or domestic) feed and fodder production providing for livestock, either because livestock density went down (Fraňková and Cattaneo 2018), or because fodder was increasingly imported from other regions, as in Sankt Florian, Austria (Gingrich et al 2018b) and in Prince Edward Island, Canada . Even at the national scale, this replacement is evident, as in Spain (Guzmán et al 2018), a country specializing in livestock production using large quantities of imported fodder.…”

Landscape Agroecology. The Dysfunctionalities of Industrial Agriculture and the Loss of the Circular Bioeconomy in the Barcelona Region, 1956–2009

“…The current state of research in landscape agroecology is set in the outcomes of the Sustainable Farm Systems research project, which has focused on an innovative development of Energy Return on Investment (EROI) analysis [6,[11][12][13] also merging it with MuSIASEM [14], on nutrient cycles [15,16] and on the original development of Energy-Landscape Integrated Analysis [10,17,18], which in turn draw from previous work on social metabolism [9,19,20] and EROI analysis [21]. As well, these novel methods applied in landscape agroecology can bridge with and contribute to the land sharing/sparing debate [22], which is still a controversial issue [23,24].…”

Landscape Agroecology. the Dysfunctionalities of Industrial Agriculture and the Loss of the Circular Bioeconomy in the Barcelona Region, 1956-2009

“…The current state of research in landscape agroecology is set in the outcomes of the Sustainable Farm Systems research project, which has focused on an innovative development of EROI analysis [29,41,69,71] also merging it with MuSIASEM [74], on nutrient cycles [72,73] and on the original development of Energy-Landscape Integrated Analysis [40][41][42][43], which in turn draw from previous work on social metabolism [20,75,77] and EROI analysis [76]. As well, these novel methods applied in landscape agroecology can bridge with and contribute to the land sharing/sparing debate [78] which is still a controversial issue [79,80] The main aim of this paper is to assess, for the case study of the Barcelona Metropolitan Region, the loss in sustainability that has occurred as a result of agricultural industrialization by highlighting the virtues of a past model that could inspire future developments towards more sustainable agriculture, landscape and diets.…”