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Does Your Landscape Mirror What You Eat? A Long-Term Socio-metabolic Analysis of a Local Food System in Vallès County (Spain, 1860–1956–1999)

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Socio-Metabolic Perspectives on the Sustainability of Local Food Systems

Part of the book series: Human-Environment Interactions ((HUEN,volume 7))

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Abstract

We assess the social metabolism of very different farm systems that existed in Vallès County , along the socio-ecological transition from organic to industrial agriculture at three different time points from 1860 to 1999. This allows us to analyze these contrasting food systems by focusing on four perspectives: agricultural labour productivity in relation to regional diets, the importance of multi-functionality in agroecosystems , the loss of landscape diversity and species richness , and the impacts of the current food regime at global and local scales . The socio-metabolic profiles obtained show that (1) winegrowing specialization co-existed with sustenance-oriented organic farming in 1860; (2) in 1956, the resumption of grain growing, combined with incipient use of industrial fertilizers, led to a more diverse agroecosystem where greater dependence on external inputs was countered by an increased productivity , providing more balanced diets and producing minor impacts on landscape ecology; (3) by 1999, a specialization in feedlots had disconnected local diets from a linear agro-industrial feed-meat chain based on huge feed imports from the Global South , leading to highly polarized socio-ecological impacts. Whereas unequal ecological exchange affects peasant communities and agroecosystems in feed-exporting countries, local landscapes suffer from the accumulation of dung waste poured into flatlands and from forest abandonment in steeper areas.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    When referring to funds, we assume the distinction between stock and fund made by Georgescu-Roegen (1971). A biophysical fund provides a flow while either maintaining itself or being maintained (Faber et al. 1995), thus remaining as such within the time span adopted to account for a specific process (Mayumi 1991). Our flowchart of an agroecosystem differentiates among four principal funds: farming community, farmland, livestock, and associated biodiversity (Tello et al. 2016). For more details, see Marco et al. (forthcoming).

  2. 2.

    These indicators are derived from the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) that is calculated through energy analysis: External Inputs mean those flows coming from outside the agroecosystem boundaries; Biomass Reused is the share of NPPact devoted to maintain the livestock, or farmland soil fertility; Unharvested Biomass is the share of NPPact that remains available for the associated biodiversity; Final Produce is the total amount of NPPact that is available to be consumed by the farming community or that goes outside the agro-ecosystem. For a deeper definition of these concepts, see Tello et al. (2016). Once the flows have been calculated, the indicators are the following: \(NPPEROI = \frac{{NPP_{act} }}{BR + EI}\) where BR is the Biomass Reused and EI the External Inputs; \(AFEROI = \frac{FP}{BR + EI\,*\,UB}\) where FP is the Final Produce and UB the Unharvested Biomass.

  3. 3.

    The mathematical expression of the Shannon Index, modified for agrarian metabolism, is shown in Marull et al. (2016) as \(L = \left( { - \mathop \sum \nolimits_{i = 1}^{k} p_{i} { \log }_{k} p_{i} } \right)\left( {1 - p_{u} } \right)\) where p is the share of surface for each land use, k is the number of land covers not considering the urban ones, and pu the share of urban area over the total. On the other hand, the formula for the Effective Mesh Size, using the definition given by Jaeger (2000), is \(EMS = \frac{1}{{A_{t} }}\mathop \sum \nolimits_{i = 1}^{n} A_{i}^{2}\) being At the total surface, n the number of patches, and Ai the surface of each patch.

  4. 4.

    In Catalonia, vertical integration on pig feeding accounts for around 75% of the feedlots, and the greatest share measuring it in total weight. So it seems reasonable to estimate that its’ consumption of feed will have a similar pattern in international sources as the Spanish one (Observatori del Porcí 2009).

  5. 5.

    The most labour intensive fertilizing activities abandoned were burying fresh biomass and burning formiguers, a series of small charcoal kilns incorporated into the soil (Garrabou and Planas 1998; Olarieta et al. 2011).

  6. 6.

    This flow refers to that part of an agroecosystem’s products and services (from agriculture, livestock and forestry) that is destined to final use or consumption, as explained in Tello et al (2016).

  7. 7.

    The External Final EROI (EFEROI) is calculated as follows: \(EFEROI = \frac{FP}{EI}\) where FP is the Final Produce and EI the External Inputs (Tello et al. 2016); Biomass Reused is not included.

  8. 8.

    A good example could be the case of biomass imports of toxo (Ulex europaeus) for vineyard fertilization; these were imported in carts during the 19th century from the interior to the coast in Galiza (North-West of Iberia), as described in Corbacho-González (2015).

  9. 9.

    Again, this indicator emerges from the proposal of the so-called Energy Return of Investment (Tello et al. 2016). The Final EROI (FEROI) accounts for the energy efficiency of the whole agroecosystem and is calculated with the following formula: \(FEROI = \frac{FP}{BR + EI}\), where FP is the Final Product, BR the Biomass Reused, and EI the External Inputs.

  10. 10.

    We express livestock density with LU500/km2, meaning the number of equivalent animals of 500 kg per km2.

  11. 11.

    In turn, this entails an associated contradiction: Farmers are giving sodium bicarbonate to ruminants to prevent the acidity produced by the excessive consumption of grains (Ferre and Baucells 2009).

  12. 12.

    The isolated Catalan farms (masies) usually included the stable on the ground floor, where animals stayed during the night, while the chambers were on the upper floor, taking advantage of the animal heat that flowed from downstairs (Closa 2012).

  13. 13.

    It is important to remember that the first motivation of an agroecosystem is to provide biotic materials for a society. Yet the continuous extraction of this final produce involves an ecological disturbance that needs to be kept below a certain level compatible with the reproduction of the agroecosystem funds. Therefore, in order to have sustainable farm systems, production must be balanced to the ecological disturbance exerted through the investment made to keep the agroecosystem functioning.

  14. 14.

    We take the definition of metabolic rift from Schneider and McMichael (2010) as “a social, ecological, and historical concept describing the disruption of natural cycles and processes and ruptures in material human-nature relations under capitalism”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economic History, Institutions, Policy and World Economy, University of Barcelona, Diagonal 690, 08034, Barcelona, Spain

    Roc Padró, Inés Marco & Enric Tello

  2. Barcelona Institute of Regional and Metropolitan Studies (IERMB), Autonomous University of Barcelona, MRA Building, Bellaterra, 08193, Barcelona, Spain

    Claudio Cattaneo

  3. University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Jonathan Caravaca

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  1. Roc Padró
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  2. Inés Marco
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  3. Claudio Cattaneo
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  4. Jonathan Caravaca
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  5. Enric Tello
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Correspondence to Roc Padró .

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  1. Department of Environmental Studies, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Eva Fraňková

  2. Institute of Social Ecology, Faculty for Interdisciplinary Studies, Klagenfurt University, Vienna, Austria

    Willi Haas

  3. School of Environment Enterprise and Development (SEED), University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Simron J. Singh

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Padró, R., Marco, I., Cattaneo, C., Caravaca, J., Tello, E. (2017). Does Your Landscape Mirror What You Eat? A Long-Term Socio-metabolic Analysis of a Local Food System in Vallès County (Spain, 1860–1956–1999). In: Fraňková, E., Haas, W., Singh, S. (eds) Socio-Metabolic Perspectives on the Sustainability of Local Food Systems. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69236-4_5

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