Livestock: option or necessity? Changes of energy flows in an Indian village, 1950-2022

Hemingway Charlotte, Aubron Claire, Vigne Mathieu. 2023. Livestock: option or necessity? Changes of energy flows in an Indian village, 1950-2022. In : Book of Abstracts of the 74th Annual Meeting of the European Federation of Animal Science. EAAP. Wageningen : Wageningen Academic Publishers, Résumé, p. 853. (EAAP Book of Abstracts, 29) ISBN 978-90-8686-384-6 Annual Meeting of the European Federation of Animal Science (EAAP). 74, Lyon, France, 26 Août 2023/1 Septembre 2023.

Résumé : Since the 1950's, agriculture in India has undergone many 'revolutions'. In Anantapur, a dryland area in Southern India, the Yellow, Green and White revolutions focused on boosting the production of groundnut, rice and milk respectively. Those revolutions have not impacted farms in the same way but the role of livestock has changed substantially, modifying the circularity of energy at different levels. We combine the comparative agriculture and the territorial metabolism approaches to study the energy transition of the agriculture of a village in Southern India from the 1950's to today. For both time steps we look at changes of energy flows at farm and territorial levels, assessing the size and nature of the flows of energy (human and animal labour, gross energy of biomass and fossil energies) entering, circulating and exiting the farm and the territory. We rely on a cycling index to estimate the proportion of total internal flows among the total flows involved, and on a fossil energy consumption index to assess the dependency of farms on non-renewable external resources. Circularity of energy within farms has declined but has been reshaped at the scale of the territory. While energy flows are at both periods driven to a large extent by livestock, the nature of circularity has been modified by the use of fossil fuels. In the 1950's circularity and livestock was a sine qua non for agricultural production: livestock served for ploughing, lifting water for irrigation, producing food and manure. Toda y flows of energy are an outlet of agricultural production: livestock is no longer a necessity but rather an option for farms aiming to specialise in either milk or meat production. In the current configuration, livestock is fed partly on co-products thus fuelling the circularity of the terri tory. But as the cultivation of crops requires fuel and electricity, the current circularity depends on 'pulses' of external fossil energy to be maintained. We therefore show that livestock-based circularity is not always an indicator of sustainable land-use.

Auteurs et affiliations

• Hemingway Charlotte, Institut Agro Montpellier (FRA)
• Aubron Claire, Institut Agro Montpellier (FRA)
• Vigne Mathieu, CIRAD-ES-UMR SELMET (MDG) ORCID: 0000-0003-1543-9043

Source : Cirad-Agritrop (https://agritrop.cirad.fr/609149/)

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