The Social Metabolism of Spanish Agriculture, 1900–2008

Abstract

This chapter is focused in the assessment of the changes and performance of biophysical, land and livestock fund elements throughout the twentieth century to meet society’s biomass requirements. First section of the chapter provides a historiographic review of the main transformations in Spanish agriculture since 1900s. In the second section, we reveal the changes in land use since 1900 and we discuss whether Spain’s evolution followed the so-called forest transition and its associated theory of production intensification. The production of biomass of plant and animal origin and into categories of different uses and fates, including domestic extraction, is analyzed in the following sections. The last part of the chapter provides a holistic understanding of the biophysical implications of the sector’s industrialization. We found that over the last century, Spanish agriculture evolved towards increasing production commodification and significant changes in the patterns of biomass use. At national scale, production efforts were mainly focused on cultivated lands, thus perpetuating the process of “agricolization.” In addition, the spectacular livestock growth was mainly based on intensive landless farms, without any food ties to the land. At a farm scale, production specialization entailed a strong tendency to suppress crop and polyculture associations, the simplification of rotations, and their later suppression; the substantial reduction of fallows and the fostering of crop alternations were governed by market demands Agriculture shifted from crop and plant heterogeneity and their layout adjustments to monocultures, entailing significant reductions of genetic, structural, and functional diversity.