Abstract
BackgroundConventional agriculture is increasingly based on highly specialized, highly productive farms. It has been suggested that 1) this specialization leads to farms that lack resilience to changing market and environmental conditions; and 2) that by decreasing agricultural diversity, the resilience of the farming system also decreases.MethodsWe used agricultural gross margin (GM) forecasts from 1966 to 2010 and remote sensing data from agricultural landscapes in the lowland UK, in conjunction with modern portfolio theory, to test the hypothesis that decreasing land-use diversity results in landscapes that provide higher, but more volatile, economic returns. We considered the role of spatial scale on the expected levels of volatility and resilience of agricultural returns.ResultsWe found that: 1) there was a strong linear trade-off between expected GMs and the expected volatility of those GMs in real lowland agricultural landscapes in the UK; 2) land-use diversification was negatively correlated with expected GMs from agriculture, and positively correlated with decreasing expected volatility in GMs; 3) the resilience of agricultural returns was positively correlated with the diversity of agricultural land use, and the resilience of agricultural returns rose quickly with increased land-holding size at small spatial extents, but this effect diminished after landholdings reached 12,000 hectares.ConclusionsLand-use diversity may have an important role in ensuring resilient agricultural returns in the face of uncertain market and environmental conditions, and land-holding size plays a pivotal role in determining the relationships between resilience and returns at a landscape scale. Creating finer-grained land-use patterns based on pre-existing local land uses may increase the resilience of individual farms, while maintaining aggregate yield across landscapes.
Highlights
Conventional agriculture is increasingly based on highly specialized, highly productive farms
We present the results of an empirical study that used data on forecasted annual average agricultural gross margins (GMs) between 1966 and 2010 and data on land-use diversity to examine the relationships between landscape units with different levels of agricultural diversity and the amount and volatility of the expected GMs from agriculture that each different landscape unit provided
Horticulture, and dairy showed the highest expected returns over the analysis period of 1966 to 2010 (Table 2). These GMs may be misleading in comparison to the other GMs presented here, owing to the lack of information about the fixed cost of machinery in the estimates, which are likely to be high for these particular land uses
Summary
Conventional agriculture is increasingly based on highly specialized, highly productive farms. During the past 60 years, changes in the agricultural industry have led to a global agrifood system dominated by large, capital-intensive farms [1,2,3] These farms are increasingly specialized in terms of the crops they produce, and are dependent on inputs from other sectors of the economy [4,5,6]. We present the results of an empirical study that used data on forecasted annual average agricultural gross margins (GMs) between 1966 and 2010 and data on land-use diversity (derived from census data and satellite imagery) to examine the relationships between landscape units with different levels of agricultural diversity and the amount and volatility of the expected GMs from agriculture that each different landscape unit provided. These analyses indicate the extent to which, and at what scales, there may be a trade-off between expected GMs and the volatility and resilience of those expected GMs
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