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Providing Food While Sustaining Soil Fertility in Two Pre-industrial Alpine Agroecosystems

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Abstract

This article employs the concept of socio-ecological metabolism for historical analyses of agroecosystems. We empirically investigate two case studies in the Austrian Alps of c. 1830 in terms of food and feed provision and soil nitrogen (N) balances. Total biomass extraction and food production were higher in the prealpine Enns valley. However, the larger non-agricultural population working in metal processing relied on food imports. In the high alpine Möll valley, food production was lower, but sustained the smaller regional population. There is no evidence of soil N-depletion at the regional scale in the Enns valley, but it cannot be ruled out in the Möll valley. While our results confirm that output intensity of land use increases with population density, the lower soil N-balance of the less densely populated Möll valley indicates that system-level land-use intensity was unexpectedly higher.

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Notes

  1. Krausmann (2004) estimates 75 % of caloric food intake to stem from dairy products in an Alpine village. While we do find shares of up to 59 % in single villages, the regional average for the Möll valley is significantly lower at 38 %.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge support from the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC – Partnership Grant 895-2011-1020.). The Möll valley data were first collected in the research project Flusslandschaftstypen Österreichs - Leitbilder für eine nachhaltige Entwicklung von Flusslandschaften, funded by the Austrian Ministry of Education in 2003. We thank the project teams of SFS and LUISE (ERC-2010-Stg-263522) for fruitful and inspiring discussions, particularly Karlheinz Erb, Dino Güldner and Enric Tello. We also thank Stefan Brabec, Helmut Haller and Elisabeth Leichtfried for support with digitizing archival material.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Social Ecology Vienna, Alpen-Adria University, Vienna, Austria

    Simone Gingrich & Fridolin Krausmann

  2. Institute of Hydrobiology and Aquatic Ecosystem Management, ​University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria

    Gertrud Haidvogl & Sabine Preis

  3. Ecology Section, Department of Animal and Plant Biology and Ecology, University of Jaén, Campus de Excelencia Internacional Agroalimentario, ceiA3, Jaén, Spain

    Roberto Garcia-Ruiz

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  1. Simone Gingrich
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  2. Gertrud Haidvogl
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  5. Roberto Garcia-Ruiz
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Correspondence to Simone Gingrich.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 8 Archival source information of sources used
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Table 9 Conversion factors used to generate food and feed balances, as well as soil N balances: water content, nutritional value and N-content
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Gingrich, S., Haidvogl, G., Krausmann, F. et al. Providing Food While Sustaining Soil Fertility in Two Pre-industrial Alpine Agroecosystems. Hum Ecol 43, 395–410 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-015-9754-0

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