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Organic farming in the past and today: sociometabolic perspective on a Central European case study

Regional Environmental Change volume 18, pages 951–963 (2018)Cite this article

Abstract

This paper contributes to the vivid academic debate on potentially more sustainable models of food production, focusing especially on energy issues. Applying social metabolism and energy flow analysis, it compares the functioning of a current small-scale organic family farm in the village of Holubí Zhoř, Czech Republic, with the historical performance of the village agroecosystem in c.1840. Historical data from the Franciscan stable cadastre and current data from direct field research are employed to quantify main productive assets (land, livestock, machinery and labour) and related energy flows into energy balance indicators. Their comparison shows that the present farm lies halfway between modern mechanized and traditional organic agriculture and thus constitutes an indicative case of the limits and potentialities of present-day more sustainable farm systems. Methodologically, the study is innovative by applying the social metabolism approach on the local (village and farm) level in the context of the global North, and by advancing the use of Energy Return On Investment (EROI) indicators for agroecosystems.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Czech Science Foundation, Grant no. 13-38994P: Quest for sustainable food production: Social and financial metabolism of selected local food systems. Claudio Cattaneo acknowledges support from the Sustainable Farm Systems project, partnership Grant 895-2011-1020 awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The historical cadastral data were provided for free by the Moravian Provincial Archives in Brno (Czech Republic). We are further grateful for the help of Majka Chudíková and Lucka Jahnová with the field data collection, Bára Machová, Hana Bernardová, Kamila Svobodová and Hana Prymusová with translation and interpretation of the historical data, Martin Černý and Nikola Šťastná with data transcription, Simone Gingrich for her kind support during the analysis, and Nadia Johanisová for language corrections. We are also grateful to two anonymous referees for their valuable feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Eva Fraňková

  2. Barcelona Institute of Regional and Metropolitan Studies, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Claudio Cattaneo

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  1. Eva Fraňková
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  2. Claudio Cattaneo
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Correspondence to Eva Fraňková.

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10113_2016_1099_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Comparison of land use patterns: historical and current national scale (1843 and 2012), and case studies (village c.1840 and farm 2012). Source: own calculation based on Kušková et al. (2008); MoA (2013); ČÚZK (2015) (PDF 319 kb)

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Fraňková, E., Cattaneo, C. Organic farming in the past and today: sociometabolic perspective on a Central European case study. Reg Environ Change 18, 951–963 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-016-1099-8

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Keywords

  • Sustainable farm systems
  • Social metabolism
  • Organic farming
  • Local food systems
  • EROI (Energy Return On Investment) in agriculture
  • Franciscan stable cadastre