Abstract
Modern food production depends on limited natural resources for providing energy and fertilisers. We assess the fossil fuel dependency for the Danish food production system by means of Food Energy Returned on fossil Energy Invested (Food-EROI) and by the use of energy intensive nutrients from imported livestock feed and commercial fertilisers. The analysis shows that the system requires 221 PJ of fossil energy per year and that for each joule of fossil energy invested in farming, processing and transportation, 0.25 J of food energy is produced; 0.28 when crediting for produced bioenergy. Furthermore, nutrients in commercial fertiliser and imported feed account for 84%, 90% and 90% of total supply of N, P and K, respectively. We conclude that the system is unsustainable because it is embedded in a highly fossil fuel dependent system based on a non-circular flow of nutrients. As energy and thus nutrient constraints may develop in the coming decades, the current system may need to adapt by reducing use of fossil energy at the farm and for transportation of food and feed. An operational strategy may be to relocalise the supply of energy, nutrients, feed and food.
Highlights
Food is the most basic requirement of any society and having sufficient food is a prerequisite for maintaining social stability
Danish agriculture was supplied with 446,000 t N, of which only 13% came from fossil fuel independent domestic sources, 44% came from commercial fertiliser and 40% came from imported feed (Table 1)
Replenishment of the stock of N, P and K in Danish agriculture was highly depending on commercial fertilisers and imported feed and on fossil energy
Summary
Food is the most basic requirement of any society and having sufficient food is a prerequisite for maintaining social stability. The most important source of food is terrestrial ecosystems, which supplies more than 99% of global food production [1]. By 2030, the world is expected to require at least 50% more food and 45% more energy to sustain the global population growing in numbers and affluence [2]. Understanding the interactions between food and energy supply and demand is, important for planning of a future sustainable development for agriculture. Industrialisation of agriculture made it possible to increase food production at roughly the same pace as demand and helped the human population to increase by more than 400% in the. The industrialisation of agriculture was a transition from an agricultural practice that mainly relied on flow-limited resources to a practice that increasingly relied on stock-limited resources [4]. Local, flow-limited energy sources like sun and wind and local nutrients such as soil-bound phosphorus and nitrogen from microbial fixation were subsidised by the stock-limited resources of fossil energy, synthesised nitrogen based on natural gas and mineral phosphorus
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