Beyond Chayanov: A sustainable agroecological farm reproductive analysis of peasant domestic units and rural communities (Sentmenat; Catalonia, 1860)

R. Padró, I. Marco, C. Font and E. Tello

Ecological Economics, 2019, vol. 160, issue C, 227-239

Abstract: We present a Sustainable Agroecological Farm Reproduction Analysis that links two methodologies kept separated so far: Optimization Modelling, and Social Metabolism accounting of the biophysical turnover from a fund-flow approach. This socio-agro-ecological model combines two scales, at farm-gate and municipal levels, and formalizes all relevant flows interlinking three living funds that have to be reproduced over time: the domestic unit, livestock and soil fertility. From the requirements and capacities of each fund (constraints), we run the model under different scenarios (objective functions) to see the different configurations that the landscape structure and the flow patterns can take (variables), ensuring the reproducibility of funds. By changing the objectives we obtain an intensive optimum that minimizes the land required; an extensive optimum that minimizes labour; and a monetary optimum that maximizes a prevailing cash crop. The model is applied to a past advanced organic farming of a Catalan village c.1860 to generate a set of counterfactual scenarios that, confronted with historical data, help to reveal how institutional settings and landownership inequality played a role in maintaining the real socio-agro-ecological structure away from these optima, and the existing potential of possible eco-functional intensification practices aimed at reducing the land cost of agrarian sustainability.

Keywords: Social metabolism; Optimization; Agroecosystems; Counterfactual analysis; Reproductive modelling; Socioecological accounting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800917312338
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:160:y:2019:i:c:p:227-239

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.02.009

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().