Agricultural Inputs and Their Energy Costs 1900–2010

Abstract

During the socio-metabolic transition to the current industrial society, agriculture has been relegated, in favor of fossil fuels and minerals, as main source of energy and material, and this has provoked a big quantitative and qualitative changes in its technical means of agricultural and livestock productions. In this chapter, the changes of the social fund element, such as the technical means of production, which include machinery, fuels, irrigation regime and types, agricultural electricity use, fertilizers and plant protection products, during the industrialization process were assessed. All of these became widespread from the middle of the sixties and never stopped growing, except for fertilizers and plant protection products which remain relatively unchanged from the economic-financial crisis. In addition, coinciding with the marked livestock production described in previous chapter, livestock feed grew spectacularly and by 2008, it accounted for 38% of the energy value of all inputs used in the agricultural sector. This phenomenal growth of inputs generally explains Spanish agriculture’s loss of efficiency, as it will be described in Chap. 5. An enormous amount of energy originating from outside the Spanish agricultural sector need to be injected into agroecosystems to maintain the continuous growth of agricultural production, resulting in a very low efficiency; while domestic extraction grew by 38%, the use of external energy multiplied by a hundred.