Abstract
Traditional low-input agriculture had to organize local land, labor and livestock resources in a way that maintained soil fertility and stable yields, albeit at a low level. Industrialization transformed the socioecological functioning of agriculture and its role in social metabolism. Agriculture turned into a high input/high output system that obtains high yields but consumes more energy than it produces. By formalizing the functional interrelations of agricultural systems into a sociometabolic model, we are able to reconstruct this process of transformation for the case of Austria .
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Notes
- 1.
The large animal unit (LAU) is a standardized measure for livestock; all livestock is converted into animal units of 500Â kg live-weight; i.e., a cow weighing 250Â kg equals 0.5Â LAU.
- 2.
These basic innovations were closely related, directly or indirectly, to a series of other fossil-fuel-based technologies, e.g., breeding technologies, biotechnology, pesticides and herbicides, irrigation systems, industrial processing of raw materials, and refrigeration and conservation systems.
- 3.
The spatial entities for which statistical data are recorded have changed between 1830 and 1999. The results for 1999 cover a considerably larger area. Averages and relative values can, however, be compared with reasonable accuracy over time.
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Krausmann, F. (2016). From Energy Source to Sink: Transformations of Austrian Agriculture. In: Haberl, H., Fischer-Kowalski, M., Krausmann, F., Winiwarter, V. (eds) Social Ecology. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33326-7_21
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