Geoff Cunfer

Manure Matters on the Great Plains Frontier

American farmers followed a long-term sequence of clearing land, farming it for several decades, and then abandoning it in favor of new land elsewhere. For 300 years, farmers moved across the continent until they reached the Great Plains, and the end of the frontier, in the 1870s. Fertility and crop yields declined for fifty years by the 1930s, an agricultural crisis was looming. Only the adoption of synthetic fertilizer after World War II allowed farmers to continue annual cropping.

Adaptation on an Agricultural Frontier: Socio-Ecological Profiles of Great Plains Settlement, 1870–1940

Systematic evaluation of agricultural settlements on the Great Plains, employing census data and socio-ecological metabolism methods drawn from sustainability science and agro-ecology, reveals that farmers, driven by personal ambition and national incentives, not only changed their environment; they also adjusted to it in more ways than previously supposed. The “socio-ecological profiles” used in this analysis of the Great Plains are applicable to any agricultural region where governments collected the requisite census data.

A landscape ecology assessment of land-use change on the Great Plains-Denver (CO, USA) metropolitan edge

For better or worse, in those parts of the world with a widespread farming, livestock rising, and urban expansion, the maintenance of species richness and ecosystem services cannot depend only upon protected natural sites. Can they rely on a network of cultural landscapes endowed with their own associated biodiversity? We analyze the effects of land-cover change on landscape ecological patterns and processes that sustain bird species richness associated to cropland-grassland landscapes in the Great Plains-Denver metropolitan edge. Our purpose is to assess the potential contribution to bird biodiversity maintenance of Great Plain’s cropland-grassland mosaics kept as farmland green belts in the edge of metropolitan areas. We present a quantitative landscape ecology assessment of land-cover changes (1930–2010) experienced in five Great Plains counties in Colorado. Several landscape metrics assess the diversity of land-cover patterns and their impact on ecological connectivity indices. These metrics are applied to historical land-cover maps and datasets drawn from aerial photos and satellite imagery. The results show that the cropland-grassland mosaics that link the metropolitan edge with the surrounding habitats sheltered in less human-disturbed areas provide a heterogeneous land matrix were a high bird species richness exists. They also suggest that keeping multifunctional farmland-grassland green belts near the edge of metropolitan areas may provide important ecosystem services, supplementing traditional conservation policies. Our maps and indicators can be used for selecting certain types of landscape patterns and priority areas on which biodiversity conservation efforts and land-use planning can concentrate.

Agroecosystem energy transitions: exploring the energy-land nexus in the course of industrialization

Agriculture and forestry are integral parts of the socioeconomic energy system, not only in the recent context of biofuel production, but also from a fundamental, long-term socio-ecological perspective (Rappaport 1971; Bayliss-Smith 1982; Sieferle 2001). For most of human history, biomass was humanity’s major source of primary energy, and since the Neolithic Revolution, agriculture and forest use have been society’s mainmechanism for harnessing energy. Even though fossil fuels and other modern energy forms became dominant in the last two centuries, biomass remains vital to the current energy regime (Krausmann et al. 2008). Humanity continues to rely on agriculture for food supply. Taken together, food and feed constitute the energy sources essential for the reproduction of human and livestock populations and the provision of human and animal labor (Kander et al. 2014). In the future, we will need to feed a growing population while also moving away from fossil energy and toward a new type of low-carbon energy system. Both goals will require an efficient and sustainable agricultural production system, one with high biomass output but which does not deplete soil fertility or depend on high inputs of non-renewable resources. Understanding the energy dynamics of agroecosystems is thus crucial to feeding the people of the world in the face of an uncertain energy future. Industrialization had profound and long-term impacts on both societal and ecological processes far beyond agriculture. From a socio-ecological perspective, industrialization resulted from technological innovations enabling the mobilization of previously untapped fossil energy sources, conceptualized in the notion Benergy transition^ (Grübler 2008). The increasing technical energy availability fostered unprecedented economic growth (Ayres and Warr 2010) and the emergence of modern political structures (Mitchell 2009; Scheffer et al. 2017). The ecological impacts of industrialization were equally substantial and have led researchers to propose a new geological era, the BAnthropocene,^ in which, they argue, humans have become a global geological force (Crutzen 2006; Steffen et al. 2007). One important effect of industrialization was the partial separation of energy provision from land use: pre-industrial societies relied on local, land-based resources for their energy provision, e.g., fuelwood for cooking, heating, and manufacturing or draught animals, fed on biomass, for transport (Fernandes et al. 2007). Industrializing societies, on the other hand, supplemented their energy supplies with modern energy carriers (Pachauri and Jiang 2008) that require much less land for extraction or generation. Paradoxically, industrialization processes have usually resulted in increasing total biomass extraction and consumption, as has been demonstrated in long-term socioecological research (LTSER, see Haberl et al. 2006; Singh et al. 2013). Various case studies around the globe have studied increasing biomass extraction and use at different scales, ranging * Simone Gingrich simone.gingrich@boku.ac.at

Sustaining Agricultural Systems in the Old and New Worlds: A Long-Term Socio-Ecological Comparison

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tens of millions of migrants left Europe for the Americas. Using case studies from Austria and Kansas, this chapter compares the socio-ecological structures of the agricultural communities immigrants left to those they created on the other side of the Atlantic. It employs material and energy flow accounting (MEFA) methods to examine the social metabolic similarities and differences between Old World and New World farm systems at either end of the migration chain. Nine indicators reveal significant differences in land use strategy, labour deployment and the role of livestock. Whereas Old World farms had abundant human and animal labour but a shortage of land, Great Plains farms had excess land and a shortage of labour and livestock. Austrian farmers returned 90% of extracted nitrogen to cropland, sustaining soils over many generations, but they produced little marketable surplus. A key difference was livestock density. Old World communities kept more animals than needed for food and labour to supply manure that maintained cropland fertility. Great Plains farmers used few animals to exploit rich grassland soils, returning less than half of the nitrogen they extracted each year. Relying on a stockpiled endowment of nitrogen, they produced stupendous surpluses for market export, but watched crop yields decline between 1880 and 1940. Austrian immigrants to Kansas saw their return on labour increase 20-fold. Both farm systems were efficient in their own way, one producing long-term stability, the other remarkable commercial exports. Kansas farmers faced a soil nutrient crisis by the 1940s, one that they solved in the second half of the twentieth century by importing fossil fuels. Austrian and Great Plains agriculture converged thereafter, with dramatically increased productivity based on oil, diesel fuel, petroleum-based pesticides and synthetic nitrogen fertilisers manufactured from natural gas.

Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (review)

The history of the relationship between science and religion has been the focus of a growing number of books and collections in the almost twenty years that have elapsed since the publication of the present editors’ earlier volume, God and Nature.1 Like its predecessor, the book under review starts by distancing itself from the warfare metaphor used to characterize the relationship between science and religion in the nineteenth century and the arst seven decades of the twentieth. More recent scholarship has tended to focus on the interaction—often positive— between the two areas rather than their conoict. The well-written essays in this book cover material from the Middle Ages through the post-Darwinian debates, highlighting science in the medieval Church, the trial of Galileo, the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century, the history of the earth and the book of Genesis, various aspects of the debates about evolution, the Scopes trial, and secularization. Most of the essays are clear, and the excellent, annotated bibliography mentions many important readings. The arst ave articles deal with the medieval, Renaissance, and early modern period. The remaining seven chapters deal with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the English-speaking world. In these respects, the present volume differs from its predecessor, which devoted a larger proportion of articles to the early periods and considered a wider range of linguistic venues. This difference mirrors changes in the history of science, a aeld in which the center of gravity has moved forward in time from the period of the scientiac revolution to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the essays in this book largely avoid the clichés of the warfare metaphor, they tend to treat science and religion as separate entities with a history of encounters. There is little consideration of the ways in which each area has penetrated the other and informed its concepts or ways of thinking. The volume would have been enriched by discussions of how the historical approaches of Charles Lyell’s geology and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution reoect the inouence of biblical narrative rather than the Greek emphasis on harmony and form or how nineteenth-century biblical scholarship reoects the application of scientiac and empirical methods to all areas of intellectual life. Nevertheless, Lindberg and Numbers have produced a useful collection, which does not replace their earlier volume but makes much of its content accessible to a wider, less specialized audience.