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From ... in History Literature —

The Great Decoupling: Not more, but better part 3

In the two previous articles, I have given a big picture of agriculture developments from a production and economic perspective. My main point is that the development of the agri-food system has been driven by four mega-trends (or mega-driv

The Great Decoupling: Not more, but better part 3

In the two previous articles, I have given a big picture of agriculture developments from a production and economic perspective. My main point is that the development of the agri-food system has been driven by four mega-trends (or mega-drivers): 1) the use of fossil fuels in all stages of the food chain, 2) the increasing population and urbanization, 3) the commodification and globalization and, 4) the conversion of people to consumers. The rise of supermarket chains, the fast food chains, factory farming, food waste, the conversion of landscapes into monocultures, food deserts, obesity, malnutrition, ultra-processed food, you name it –the four mega-drivers explain them quite well, and certainly a lot better than the prevailing, narrative of consumer preferences.

Here, I will go into the ecological perspective of the development of the agri-food system. Let’s start with a short historical perspective:

I will not go into the mechanisms which led our ancestors to slowly and gradually, abandon foraging and develop farming or agriculture. One reason I don’t do that is that new research shows that the process might have been a lot more convoluted than previously thought, another is that it simply will take more than this article to do justice to the topic. I have written extensively about it both in Garden Earth and Global Eating Disorder.

Let me just, for the record, state that there are no strong reasons to believe that human beings were forced to farm in order to feed an increasingly hungry population. Farming was almost certainly developed by already settled people who still got most of their food through the old ways of hunting and gathering. The “first farmers” were actually not at all farmers in the sense that they could feed themselves from farming alone. If they had tried, they would have starved to death. They probably farmed certain crops that were uncommon and difficult to find, such as medicinal herbs, or crops that they fancied a lot, more like gardening. As settled populations grew, farming changed from being an opportunity to a necessity. Through farming the human carrying capacity of the land is multiplied compared to foraging. This is accomplished by humans appropriating a larger share of the primary production by means of actively favouring the crops and animals they eat, the domesticates, and suppress other species. Natural eco systems are thereby transformed into agro-ecosystems.

Energy, water and nutrients

There are many things to juggle with in farming and all are of course important. Three very important aspects of farming is energy − in the form of sunlight, carbon and carbohydrates, which in turn feeds labour − water and nutrients. Three very different systems emerged to deal with these. In swiddening (slash and burn) farmers use fire to clear the land for sowing. The energy use, in the form of biomass burnt, is massive. But the energy source is already there and the work to put it on fire is moderate. The seeds will easily be planted and a lot of nutrients have been released both through the regeneration process of forests and from the ashes. Water and availability of land are main limiting factors for these systems.

Big rivers flowing through dry plains gave rise to unique possibilities for farming. Because the plains were dry, they had little forest, and because the plains were around the rivers, they were seasonally flooded. When this happened the land was covered by fertile mud. This meant that two of the most labor-intensive parts of farming – soil preparation and application of fertilizers – were done by nature. Having water easily available, it was not a big initial step to develop irrigation (in the end they developed very complex and far reaching irrigation networks). Fertile flood plains have been the cradle for most successful and some of the most durable civilizations. Still today most of these flood plains continue to provide billions of humans with food.

The third system is pastoralism, by which people move livestock to where there is water and nutrients available. Pastoralism is still practiced in similar ways as thousands of years ago; the main differences are social changes such as the emergence of nation borders restricting movements, competition over land with farming and other activities as well as commodification. Pastoralists often manipulate the ecosystems, e.g. by burning, digging water holes and by hunting predators, but by and large it is a less intrusive way of living in an ecosystem, than the agro ecosystems of arable farming. In a similar way as foraging and swiddening, it can’t support as high population densities as arable farming.

The first agriculture revolution

Note: the story below is based on the developments in Western Europe. China and parts of Japan and India underwent a similar kind of intensification much earlier than Europe. This was also the reason why those countries were much richer than Europe before the European capitalism aggressively colonized most of the rest of the world.

Agriculture in Europe was mostly a mix of semi-pastoral livestock keeping and arable farming developed from an intensified swiddening agriculture, whereby a short fallow replaced the longer cycles of swiddening. The fallow was often grazed by livestock and allowed the land to regenerate (but not at all on the same level as by swiddening). In less populated areas, swiddening was practiced until the end of the 19th century and occurred even up to the second world war, even later in some places.

In the nine­teenth century, there was a great increase in agricul­tural production and productivity in Europe. This began in the Netherlands and Flanders, parts of Germany and later in England. Even if it is often called a revolution it was a rather slow process of agriculture intensifi­cation and modernization. In the new system, the strict division between infields and mea­dows was abolished. More grassland was brought under cultivation, more fodder was grown in the fields and more manure was recircu­lated to the crops. Instead of letting the land rest fallow, it was used to produce fodder. Through the introduction of crop rota­tions of legumi­nous plants, plants that bind nitrogen from the atmosphere, a lot of fodder could be produced.

Even if it sounds like a revolution, there was not a lot that was really new in this. Most of the practices were already known a long time before. It was the level of commercialization which, more than anything else, defined which technologies which would be used, rather than the existence or knowledge of certain technologies. The new methods required more energy in the form of labour; “the average number of hours worked per year by a family of agricultural labourers and small peasants must have in­creased tremen­dously in the period from the agricultural revolution to the time when agricultural machinery became widespread,” concluded Danish agrono­mist Ester Boserup, in her famous analysis The Conditions of Agricultural Growth.[i] All in all, production and consumption doubled and this was before chemical fertilizers and tractors, which came with the second agriculture revolution.[ii] I have described how this played out in Sweden here.

Parallel to the European agriculture revolution in the 1800s there was also an expansion of agriculture into virgin lands. The primary target for the expansion were wetlands and savannahs, prairies and steppes used by nomadic or semi-nomadic people in all continents. The conquest of the American prairie is perhaps the best known example, but there were similar development in South America, Australia and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. People were driven off their customary lands, mostly through violence or the threat of violence. Vast tracts of fertile land were brought under the plough by European colonizers, less fertile lands were used for large scale livestock ranching. This massive exploitation of accumulated nutrient-rich soil organic matter (natural capital) was probably as important as the silver from the South American mines in providing a one-off injection into the nascent global economy. Most of it was controlled by a few European states and the emerging power-house, the United States, but it also made Argentina and Uruguay into some of the richest countries in the world. Regionally, the drainage of wetlands were equally important as a stock of nutrients to exploit. Still today, many organogenic soils in Sweden supply sufficient nitrogen for the crops’ needs, 100-150 years after being drained.

The second agriculture revolution

For a number of reasons, similar to why the industrial revolution started in Western Europe, the second agriculture revolution originated in Western Europe and its settler colonies, despite the fact that agriculture in some other parts of the world were more advanced than European agriculture.

The second agriculture revolution came with specialization, mecha­nization and the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. A number of more or less, often less, practical farming machines were invented in the 19th century, but it was not until the end of the century that mechanization started to play any major role in farming. Mechanization was an American specialty, driven by two coinciding factors, large fields with few physical barriers and small gradients and a shortage of labour. Initially mechanization was based on animal traction, and to some extent steam power (in particular for stationary threshers).

The tractor – driven by fossil fuels – was the main symbol and the centre of mechaniza­tion, as it allowed for a multitude of machines to be pulled (the word comes from Latin trahere which means to pull). It was only in the 1930s that the combined power of tractors overtook the power of the horses in the United States.[iii] The introduction of tractors meant that the land previously used for grazing and growing food for horses and oxen for animal traction became available for the production of food and fibre for human consumption.[iv] In the United States it is estimated that by 1960 the tractor had replaced 23 million draft animals, and 79 million acres of land used to grow feed for them could be reallocated to other uses.[v] In this way, mechanization freed up more land for crop production. In addition, mechanization allowed for quicker soil preparation and harvesting, which sometimes increased yields or reduced losses. During the second agricul­ture revolution, increase in productivity per worker in agricul­ture was very rapid, outpacing that of industry. In many countries, tractors have still not yet taken over from humans and draft animals as the main source of power.

The nitrogen hunger

In farming, the availability of nutrients, particularly of nitrogen, potash and phos­phorus – mostly referred to by their chemical symbols N, P and K – is a major limiting factor. All traditional farming systems have had some strategy for replacing nutrients in the soil. One is to rest the soil and allow a natural re-charge and release of nutrients from the soil and through atmospheric deposition. Crop rotations with leguminous crops can fix nitrogen from the air and the nutritional demands of the various crops can complement each other. Phosphorous, from deeper layers or bound in the soil, can be ‘mined’ by some crops making it available to others. Nutrients can also come from irrigation water (especially sediments in flood waters), animal manure, night soil (human waste), plants, grass and other residues, a plethora of natural organic fertil­izers. Farmers have used oil-cakes, feathers, leathers, bone, sea weed and fish as fertilizers. There are even reports that human remains from battlefields and ossuaries have been used as fertilizers. Yet all these methods have some limitations, and in most cases they require a lot of work or other efforts.

There was no way of economically producing a chemical nitrogen fertilizer until Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed a process, carry­ing their names, to convert the unlimited supply of molecular nitrogen in the atmosphere into ammonia. Haber and Bosch had a factory ready in 1913. Because Germany was cut off from supplies of nitrate by the British naval blockade the factory was converted to produce bombs instead of fertilizers, giving Germany an almost limitless supply of ammunition. But after the war the production of chemical fertilizers increased. It got another boost at the conclusion of the Second World War when there was an enormous overcapacity of ammonia production as a result of the war-time production of explosives.

Swords into ploughs
When the Second World War started, the United States government constructed ten new plants to produce ammonia for munitions. All were located in the interior of the country. Several of them were built alongside natural gas pipelines so they could use the gas as raw material for their production. By the end of the war, the country had the capacity to produce 1.6 million tons per year. When the nitrogen was no longer needed for bombs, what were they going to do with all this capacity? The answer was, to use the nitrogen-rich ammonia to fertilize the nation’s fields.[vi]

Considering that nutrient supply has been an eternal challenge for farmers, it is no wonder that the farmers of the world took to artifi­cial fertilizers with great gusto. They are easier to transport than bulky organic materials such as manure, easier to apply and give somewhat predictable results. Global annual use of nitrogen fertilizers increased from 11 million tons in 1960 to more than 111 million tons in 2013.

From a regenerative system to a linear and industrial system

The second agriculture revolution completed the transformation of agriculture to a market-driven, linear, production system. In one or two generations, in high-income countries, there has been a total system shift in farming to a system that is characterized by a high dependency on the use of specialized machinery, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, market orienta­tion, specialization and indebtedness. And the effects of this on nature, society and our food have been profound.

Through mechanization, agrarian landscapes have been fundamentally restructured, with ‘obstacles’, such as trees, streams, mud holes and boulders, removed at a rapid pace and open ditches being replaced by subsurface drainage systems. As each machine needs to run as much as possible, mechanization has gone hand in hand with specialization. Crop production has become sepa­rated from livestock keeping. Whole landscapes are devoted to the commodity production of one of two crops be it lettuce (see chart!) , oil palm, soy, wheat or sunflowers. In other regions factory livestock production dominates and it is dependent on a constant supply of feed from other regions.

All the nutrients in our food are nowadays wasted into sewage systems instead of recycled to the field as was common practice earlier. When fewer fodder crops were needed for oxen, buffaloes and horses, and specialization increased, crop rotations changed to grains in monoculture, which increased disease and weed pressure. Fertilizers and pesticides were introduced to compensate for a lack of crop rotations and continuous nutrient exports. The whole system is supported by massive inputs of fossil fuels for transportation of both inputs needed in the farms and the commodities sold. Transportation has hyper-connected markets into one global market where all farmers compete with their colleagues.

From an ecological perspective, farming and the food system have gone from a myriad of local systems that were deeply embedded in local landscapes and ecosystems, into one global, industrial agri-food system decopupled from local ecological cycles. Farming practices had developed, often over millennia, to be sustainable and farming was in a wider sense sustainable and regenerated almost all resources needed. Most outputs were local inputs and vice versa; food produced resulted in labour used in the system and human waste were recirculated, last year crops was this years seed and similar for the livestock. Even knowledge-building and the human reproduction and care-taking processes were part of the system (i.e. the farms also produced and educated new farmers as well as taking care of the elderly). These traditional agroecosystems worked much in a similar way as natural ecosystems operate. Today, farming is carried out in a global commodity system, with increasingly similar technologies all over the place, according to linear models with huge flows of inputs and outputs, largely detached from the ecological contexts. Of course, in the end, you can’t decouple farming (or any other human endeavour) from the ecological frameworks. The global commodified food system has a global impact on the whole Earth system, primarily through its impact on the critical cycles of carbon, water and nitrogen. These, in turn, also influence the global food system.

It is also a similar process with the social context, where traditional farming systems were carriers and guardians of society and culture. Commodity farming, on the contrary, contributes very little to culture and society. In this way ecology and society are very closely linked to each other, as they should be.

In the next, and final, article in this series, I will sketch a vision for the future of agri-food systems.

[i] Boserup, E 2005 The Conditions of Agriculture Growth: The economics of agrarian change under population pressure. Transaction Publishers.

[ii] Mazoyer, M. and L. Roudart 2006 A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis Monthly Review Press.

[iii] Federico, G. 2005 Feeding the World Princeton.

[iv] Bath, B. S. van. 1976 De agrarische geschiedenis van West-Europa (500–1850). Het Spectrum.

[v] USDA Economic Research Service 2013 Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming Economic Research Report 152 United States Department of Agriculture.

[vi] Living History Farm 2014 ‘Farming in the 1940s’ www.livinghistoryfarm.org.

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