Eclipsed inputs and outputs in modern agriculture

Abstract

Conventional agricultural production is based on the input of resources into the cropping system from the surrounding environment, such as seeds or agrochemicals, which enables the system to generate productive outputs. The most common analysis of these systems highlights the inputs and outputs that have a market value. Going beyond economic criteria, analyzing field systems as systems that exchange matter and energy with their surroundings , allows us to identify other inputs and outputs that are often eclipsed despite their social and biological relevance. Eclipsed inputs include finite resource reservoirs such as water and crude oil. The case of the Aral sea in central Asia shows how consuming water solely according to the logic of individual fields can destroy a region's capacity to sustain human life. The social footprint of organophosphate fertilizers in Western Sahara underlines that the use of an input in a field can have consequences far away from it. Many eclipsed outputs such as agrochemicals, fossil fuels or plastics pollute our environment and have negative effects on biodiversity and human health. In all, input-based agriculture generates costs at a planetary scale, which are often relativized or invisibilized. This contributes to dissociating the economic benefits of agriculture from both the cost of using common goods and the rise in the “negative commons” (those results of a process that can harm the society as a whole). We propose that alleviating this conflict in the long term requires going beyond the handling of individual systems and crop physiology. Our management of agriculture needs to consider evolutionary timescales in our integral and interconnected system: Earth.