Agricultural Revolution and energy consumption

Summary: Changes in agriculture were made possible by changes in energy technology and have had a dramatic impact on levels of global energy consumption.

On a fundamental level, agriculture is about human access to energy. As heterotrophic organisms, humans cannot fix energy from sunlight; rather, we rely on photosynthetic plants to feed ourselves and the animals we eat. Since plant and animal domestication was first adopted in the Proto-Neolithic period (the early Stone Age, roughly 9000 to 7000 BCE), agriculture has been transforming not only how we feed ourselves but also how we organize society. Agriculture has proceeded through three revolutionary stages, from the first domestication of plants and animals to the latest innovations in industrial and biotechnology, and these changes in food production are closely linked with changes in energy production. An understanding of the history of agricultural practice and the contemporary global agricultural market system is therefore central to the study of energy resources and technologies.

The First

The first agricultural revolution was a transition from nomadic hunting-and-gathering systems to sedentary agrarian systems based on the domestication of certain plant and animal species. Food-producing techniques were developed independently in five broad geographic regions—the Middle East, South Asia, China, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas—based on a common set of technological preconditions: grindstones to mill grains, granaries to store seeds and food, and fire. Fire, fueled with wood and charcoal, enabled early humans to provide heat and light and, for the first time, to cook food, which increased its digestibility and expanded the range of plants and animals that could be eaten.

The use of fire was also an agricultural breakthrough, for it allowed for the clearing of forests on a large scale in order to create fields. This practice of burning a new site, called swidden or slash-and-burn cultivation, releases valuable nutrients into the soil, particularly potash (water-soluble potassium salts), which leaches from the ashes of woody plants.

As agricultural practices spread around the populated world from the five hearth areas defined above, they had a transformative impact on the organization of society. A sedentary lifestyle and the production of surplus food allowed for larger family sizes and higher population densities, prompted systems of rights over land and resources, and enabled the specialization of labor. As different human populations developed specialized workers and more advanced tools and crafts, they also began trading and bartering with one another, laying the foundations for our modern economic system. The first agricultural revolution represents three major transformations in the history of human energy use. First, it was driven by innovations in energy technology in the form of fire. Second, it featured the concentrated production of energy in the form of biomass. As a result of crop cultivation and animal herding, a far greater number of people could be supported by a given plot of arable land. Third, the emergence of settled villages created new types of cultural, economic, and political relationships that set the stage for urbanization, technological innovation, and other key factors in modern energy consumption and production.

The Second Agricultural Revolution

The second agricultural revolution was a transition from subsistence peasant agriculture to

commercial capitalist farming. Although many important changes in agriculture occurred in different places as part of this transition, the second agricultural revolution was, in many ways, ushered in by the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century in England and Western Europe. Prior to this period, farmers were predominantly peasants who produced food for their own households and in service to a feudal lord. With the rise of an industrialized manufacturing sector and the creation of an urban industrial workforce came the development of a commercial market for food. The integration of agricultural production into a market economy led to a breakdown of the feudal landholding system, yielding a new agrarian system based on private-property relations. Enclosed, individually owned parcels of land, often worked by tenants or renters, replaced communal lands and farming practices.

As a result of the dramatic social and economic changes in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, transformations of agricultural practices and rural life spread quickly from Europe to other parts of the world. Food production escalated and yields of crops and livestock increased, producing an unprecedented surplus with which to feed growing urban populations. Innovations in transportation technology—particularly the steam engine locomotive and improved canals and railways—made it possible to move food faster and farther than ever before, and the production of greater food surpluses catalyzed international patterns of agricultural trade. Other technological innovations included the horse-drawn iron plow, the mechanical seeder, and the threshing machine, all of which facilitated increased crop yields. The application of fertilizer began to accelerate in the 19th century, first with the application of Peruvian guano (bat feces), which was imported in large quantities to fertilize English fields, and later with synthesized chemical phosphate, potassium, and nitrogen. Some of these innovations, chemical inputs in particular, would not become widespread until centuries later. However, the industrialization and commercialization of food production reinforced the advance of a capitalist economic system that was just emerging during the 18th century and today permeates everyday life around the world.

The second agricultural revolution marks a shift to increasingly energy-intensive forms of agricultural production. Whereas early agriculture relied exclusively on solar energy, fertilizer produced naturally through ecosystem cycles, and, later, on the harnessed energy of domesticated plowing animals, industrialized agriculture relies heavily on fossil fuels to synthesize chemical inputs, to fuel mechanized planting and harvesting, and to transport agricultural products. These trends escalate during the third agricultural revolution as agriculture becomes increasingly integrated into a global market economy.

The Third Agricultural Revolution

The third agricultural revolution began in the late 19th century and gained momentum through the 20th century. Unlike the previous two revolutions, this one originated in North America and features three primary characteristics: globalized commodity chains, mechanization, and chemical farming.

A commodity chain is a sequence of steps through which resources, such as crops, are transformed into commodities and distributed to consumers. Food manufacturing began in the 19th century, but it was not until the 1960s that the manufacturing sector became deeply involved in food production. In a globalized market system, it became highly profitable for companies to concentrate large-scale agricultural production in particular areas (for example, bananas in Ecuador or apples in New Zealand); to add economic value to these products through processing, refining, and packaging treatments; and then to ship them to consumers around the world. In the 21st century, food often travels thousands of miles from where it is produced to where it is eaten.

Mechanization is the employment of tractors, pickers, combines, and other motorized machines in agricultural production. Such machines have increasingly replaced human and animal farm labor, beginning in the 1880s in the United States and spreading to Europe and eventually worldwide after World War II. Commercial mechanized farming has led to the dominance of monocultures—a single crop grown across a large area—and accompanying losses in soil quality, biological diversity, and nutritional availability. In addition to the emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases from machine exhaust, the increased tilling of soil releases large amounts of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

Chemical farming involves the use of synthetic inputs in agricultural production. Application of chemical inputs first became a widespread agricultural practice in the United States in the 1950s, later diffusing to other industrialized countries, and can now be found in countries around the world. The myriad petroleum-based chemicals used in agriculture today (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, nematicides, and fungicides) evolved directly out of the World War II chemical industry. For example, ammonium nitrate munitions led to the production of fertilizers to enrich the nitrogen content of soils. Organophosphate nerve gas and DDT—first used to control malaria and typhus among troops—were made available after the war as powerful agricultural insecticides. Decades later, Agent Orange was developed for the US Department of Defense and used to defoliate tens of millions of acres of tropical forest in Vietnam; the companies that manufactured Agent Orange, Monsanto and Dow Chemical, went on to develop Roundup and other herbicides and became the leading agricultural commodity corporations in the world. The production of chemical agricultural inputs is estimated to make up roughly 40 percent of the fossil fuel usage in industrial farming, even more than is used in transporting food, pumping irrigation water, or fueling machinery.

The third agricultural revolution brought a greater increase in food production than the world had ever seen. Although industrialized agriculture is an extremely profitable business, it is also a highly inefficient use of resources: It takes an average of 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy, and roughly 25–50 percent of all food produced in the United States spoils and is wasted at some point along its path from field to consumer. In 2000, an estimated 10 percent of all energy consumed in the United States was used in food production.

Another important result of escalating agricultural productivity is the increasing amount of cropland in many countries that is being redirected to the production of biofuels. Biofuels— ethanol, methanol, and biodiesel—are derived from renewable biological materials such as corn, soy, sugarcane, and other plants. Although biofuels are potentially a more sustainable source of energy than fossil fuels, they often require significant amounts of fossil fuels to produce. Biofuel farming has also led to the large-scale conversion of land away from food production in many countries, and it is related in complex ways to escalating global prices for food and energy.

Like any aspect of development, these processes are highly uneven, and traditional models of subsistence agriculture can be found to this day in many parts of the world. There are both modern and historical examples of less energy-intensive food systems that are alternatives to the industrialized global model that currently dominates food production.

Agricultural Mini-Revolutions

Since the 1950s, three mini-revolutions have shaped agriculture and society in dramatic ways. The focus of the Green Revolution, driven by agricultural research scientists, was the development of high-yielding varieties of seeds—primarily wheat, rice, and maize—that were bred to respond well to the chemical inputs, intense irrigation, and mechanized harvesting and processing conditions of industrialized agriculture. The Blue Revolution, which developed alongside the Green Revolution, incorporated a similar emphasis on machines and chemical inputs into aquaculture, the growing of aquatic species in ponds onshore or in pens suspended in water. Aquaculture has thus far been a great economic success in the production of farmed shrimp and salmon. The third mini-revolution is the Gene Revolution, which features the use of biotechnology or genetic modification of plants and animals in order to improve qualities such as their productivity, nutritional content, or disease-resistance.

Alternative Agriculture

A wide range of less energy-intensive forms of agriculture can be found around the world among farmers who have access to a market for sustainable products or among those, especially those in peripheral regions of the world, who cannot afford the expensive inputs required by industrialized production. Whole foods—such as fresh tomatoes, garlic, and basil, as opposed to canned tomato sauce—are less processed and therefore consume less fossil fuel. Organic farming or animal husbandry does not use petroleum-based fertilizers or pesticides, growth hormones, or genetically modified organisms. Local food is produced a short distance from where it is consumed, often at a smaller scale than conventional agriculture, which limits the fuel required for transportation and storage. An emphasis on a plant-based or vegetarian diet recognizes that eating lower on the food chain consumes fewer calories of energy (life-cycle analyses estimate it can take 35 times the calories of fossil fuels to make one calorie of beef and 68 times for one calorie of pork).

In 2024, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced a joint initiative: The Rural and Agricultural Income & Savings from Renewable Energy (RAISE) Initiative. RAISE was intended to help farmers reduce costs by assisting them in accessing renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power.

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