Abstract
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tens of millions of migrants left Europe for the Americas. Using case studies from Austria and Kansas, this chapter compares the socio-ecological structures of the agricultural communities immigrants left to those they created on the other side of the Atlantic. It employs material and energy flow accounting (MEFA) methods to examine the social metabolic similarities and differences between Old World and New World farm systems at either end of the migration chain. Nine indicators reveal significant differences in land use strategy, labour deployment and the role of livestock. Whereas Old World farms had abundant human and animal labour but a shortage of land, Great Plains farms had excess land and a shortage of labour and livestock. Austrian farmers returned 90% of extracted nitrogen to cropland, sustaining soils over many generations, but they produced little marketable surplus. A key difference was livestock density. Old World communities kept more animals than needed for food and labour to supply manure that maintained cropland fertility. Great Plains farmers used few animals to exploit rich grassland soils, returning less than half of the nitrogen they extracted each year. Relying on a stockpiled endowment of nitrogen, they produced stupendous surpluses for market export, but watched crop yields decline between 1880 and 1940. Austrian immigrants to Kansas saw their return on labour increase 20-fold. Both farm systems were efficient in their own way, one producing long-term stability, the other remarkable commercial exports. Kansas farmers faced a soil nutrient crisis by the 1940s, one that they solved in the second half of the twentieth century by importing fossil fuels. Austrian and Great Plains agriculture converged thereafter, with dramatically increased productivity based on oil, diesel fuel, petroleum-based pesticides and synthetic nitrogen fertilisers manufactured from natural gas.
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Notes
- 1.
This study is supported by U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant nos. HD044889 and HD033554. An earlier version of this text appeared as Cunfer and Krausmann (2009).
- 2.
- 3.
For an early discussion of agro-ecology as a central subject for environmental history see Worster (1990).
- 4.
- 5.
This material includes digitised versions of the original cadastral maps of the village, specific evaluations of parcel protocols (e.g., the quantification of the extent of external land use, land use data, and factor costs at the farm level). See Projektgruppe Umweltgeschichte (1997, 1999) and Winiwarter and Sonnlechner (2001).
- 6.
Climate data come from two sources. The first is Karl, T.R., Williams, C.N. Jr., Quinlan, F.T., and Boden, T.A. (1990). United States Historical Climatology Network serial temperature and precipitation data. Environmental Science Division. Publication No. 3404. Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The historical climatology data are stored as point data for weather stations at monthly intervals for 1,221 stations in the United States. The second source is National Climatic Data Center, Arizona State University, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Global Historical Climatology Network. This data set includes comprehensive monthly global surface baseline climate data. The Great Plains Population and Environment Project (www.icpsr.umich.edu/plains) interpolated data from 394 weather stations in the Great Plains to counties for each month between 1895 and 1993.
- 7.
This version of the model focuses on biophysical relations between society and nature and thus reduces the socioeconomic system to its physical components, i.e. the population and the production subsystem. See Fischer-Kowalski and Weisz (1999).
- 8.
See, for example, Schüle (1989).
- 9.
Throughout the paper we define “agricultural area” as not only cultivated and intensively used land such as cropland, meadows or fruit gardens but also uncultivated prairie and woodlands. Uncultivated prairie in Kansas and woodlands in Theyern were integral components of both agricultural systems, as they were used for grazing or to extract bedding materials and also served as sources of biomass and plant nutrients transported to intensively used cropland (Cf. Krausmann 2004; Cunfer 2004).
- 10.
One Giga Joule (GJ) corresponds to 109 J or 239 Mega calories (Mcal). Food output is measured in Joules of nutritional value according to standard nutrition tables.
- 11.
We use “area productivity” and “labour productivity” in conformity with their usage in the long-term socio-ecological literature. Readers should be aware that economists have different definitions for these terms.
- 12.
- 13.
This estimate of nitrogen return to soils is only approximate. This analysis does not include a full soil nutrient balance. For one thing, it does not consider N losses due to volatilisation and leaching. Furthermore, a comprehensive assessment of soil fertility would need to include phosphorus, potassium, and organic matter, plus the structural properties of soils. Given the limitations of historical data, this paper focuses on those N inputs and extractions that farmers control most directly. For further details concerning the procedure used to estimate nitrogen flows see Krausmann (2004, 2008, 17–20) and Cunfer (2004). On soil nutrient balances more broadly, see Loomis (1978, 1984), Campbell and Overton (1991), Loomis and Connor (1992), and Shiel (2006a, b).
- 14.
Farming Indians maintained soil fertility by swidden, moving their villages wholesale every 5–10 years when soil nutrients failed and crop yields declined. The most notable difference between New World and Old World agriculture was the presence of domesticated animals in the latter. Indian farmers had no domesticated livestock. Women tilled the soil entirely through human labour. Thus Indian agriculturalists never farmed the widespread uplands of the Great Plains. Both population densities and the area of arable land remained very low. See Hurt (1987, 57–64) and Wedel (1978).
- 15.
The most common draft animals used in Theyern around 1830 were oxen. Only the larger farms kept horses, while in small holdings cows were also used for labour (working fields and fallow areas) and transport (moving harvest from dispersed fields), fuelwood from the community forests, and manure back to the fields. Krausmann (2004) estimates that installed power amounted to 0.17 kW per ha of cropland. According to Schaschl (2007), who quantified the monthly supply of and demand for human and animal labour during the course of a year for individual farms in Theyern, the supply of animal labour exceeded demand even during peak seasons in March and April. In Finley Township, horses were the only animals used to provide work until the first tractors appeared in the 1920s. According to our estimate, installed power per unit of cropland was similar to that in Theyern.
- 16.
While the peaks in the rate of nitrogen return in Finley Township and at the Thir farm in the 1940s are due to harvest failures and consequent low nitrogen extraction rather than to increases in nitrogen input, leguminous crops contributed to the high return rate (above 50%) which can be observed for the George Thir farm in 1915. This was the only year when Thir planted a considerable fraction of his cropland with alfalfa.
- 17.
For a discussion of risk minimisation strategies see McCloskey (1976).
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Cunfer, G., Krausmann, F. (2013). Sustaining Agricultural Systems in the Old and New Worlds: A Long-Term Socio-Ecological Comparison. In: Singh, S., Haberl, H., Chertow, M., Mirtl, M., Schmid, M. (eds) Long Term Socio-Ecological Research. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1177-8_12
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