Improving agricultural sustainability: the case of Swedish greenhouse tomatoes

Abstract Of major concern to agriculturists and society are issues of sustainability and land and resource requirements for food and fiber. Sustainability of Swedish domestic agriculture is explored using the production of tomatoes in greenhouses as a case study. Issues of sustainability are related to net yields, environmental loading, greenhouse gases, employment and land use. A model for evaluation of sustainability is developed and illustrated using the concepts and theories of emergy analysis. The intensive tomato production system investigated was shown to be highly dependent on non-renewable resources and human service fed back from society. Substituting wood powder from logging residues for the oil used for heating reduced the environmental load and improved the sustainability of the system significantly.

[1]  D'arcy W. Thompson.  On Growth and Form , 1945 .

[2]  B. Stout,et al.  Energy for world agriculture. , 1979 .

[3]  Howard T. Odum,et al.  Energy Analysis Overview of Nations , 1983 .

[4]  H. Odum,et al.  Self-Organization, Transformity, and Information , 1988, Science.

[5]  G. Brundtland,et al.  Our common future , 1987 .

[6]  R. Peters.  The Ecological Implications of Body Size , 1983 .

[7]  M. T Brown,et al.  Embodied energy analysis and EMERGY analysis: a comparative view , 1996 .

[8]  Anne-Marie Tillman,et al.  Miljön och förpackningarna. Livscykelanalyser för förpackningsmaterial - beräkning av miljöbelastning , 1991 .

[9]  G. Stanhill.  The energy cost of protected cropping: a comparison of six systems of tomato production. , 1980 .

[10]  Jim McGovern,et al.  Exergy Analysis—A Different Perspective on Energy Part 1: The Concept of Exergy , 1990 .

[11]  Cutler J. Cleveland,et al.  The direct and indirect use of fossil fuels and electricity in USA agriculture, 1910–1990 , 1995 .

[12]  H. Odum.  Ecological and general systems : an introduction to systems ecology , 1994 .

[13]  Simone Bastianoni,et al.  EMERGY ANALYSIS OF ITALIAN AGRICULTURAL SYSTEM. THE ROLE OF ENERGY QUALITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL INPUTS , 1993 .

[14]  Thomas Auerbach,et al.  McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology , 1961 .

[15]  Richard C. Fluck,et al.  Energy in farm production , 1992 .

[16]  Marina Lasagni,et al.  Trends in Ecological Physical Chemistry. , 1994 .

[17]  Tim R. McClanahan,et al.  EMergy analysis perspectives of Thailand and Mekong River dam proposals , 1996 .

[18]  Mark T. Brown,et al.  Emergy-based indices and ratios to evaluate sustainability: monitoring economies and technology toward environmentally sound innovation , 1997 .