Providing Food While Sustaining Soil Fertility in Two Pre-industrial Alpine Agroecosystems

This article employs the concept of socio-ecological metabolism for historical analyses of agroecosystems. We empirically investigate two case studies in the Austrian Alps of c. 1830 in terms of food and feed provision and soil nitrogen (N) balances. Total biomass extraction and food production were higher in the prealpine Enns valley. However, the larger non-agricultural population working in metal processing relied on food imports. In the high alpine Moll valley, food production was lower, but sustained the smaller regional population. There is no evidence of soil N-depletion at the regional scale in the Enns valley, but it cannot be ruled out in the Moll valley. While our results confirm that output intensity of land use increases with population density, the lower soil N-balance of the less densely populated Moll valley indicates that system-level land-use intensity was unexpectedly higher.