Agriculture in Regard to Energy Science

Trevor Craig

Energy Science 110

Agriculture, 11

10/2/11           

This lecture was about early agriculture systems and how throughout history the way people obtain their food has changed. The beginning of agriculture is believed to have started after the ice age about 11 thousand years ago. This transfer from being a hunter gather society community to an agriculture society is often referred to as the Neolithic revolution. Agriculture is actually a very effective way of harvesting the sun’s energy for human use. There are many different types of agriculture, all of them vary slightly, but the main idea of all of them is to use the sun’s energy which is transferred to plants, which we can them harvest and eat or feed to our animals.

Water is important for the growth of plants, so when agriculture starting becoming important, hydraulic civilizations started to come to be. Hydraulic civilizations control the water supply, from rivers and lakes to do irrigation and control the amount of water the farmers are able to use, the most famous example of this sort of civilization is Egypt. Egypt has been a successful society for a very long time because the Nile provides them with water and fresh soil from the current of the Nile, which along with the fact that they are close to the equator so get lots of solar radiation, means that they are very good at producing crops, even today. Egypt makes a little more than 10 metric tons rice per hectare, where the United States makes a little less than 8 metric tons rice per hectare. Egypt is also the largest producer of sugar cane, they make approximately 120 metric tons sugarcane per hectare, where the United States makes only about 70 metric tons sugarcane per hectare in comparison. Egypt is great for agriculture but it also has one of the highest population densities and has for the past 3000 years.

Agriculture is very effective but yet we still eat meat, when energy is transferred all the way to a cow it only contains .14% of the original 100% of energy from the sun, where plants have about 2%. Skipping animals is usually more effective for energy consumption, but people cannot always digest some plants, so sometimes animals are a better choice. Plants are grown all over the world; in fact 24% of the world’s land is a cultivated system.

Today we are using more energy than ever before because we are a complex society, and this complexity is not for free. Today we use 250 Mcal/capita/day where in the 1850s we were only using only around 75 Mcal/capita/day, obviously we are using more energy and therefore need more forms of energy, and one way of obtaining this energy is agriculture. These systems need to be improved to provide for more energy for our increasingly complex society.

Biomass energy- is defined by any organic materials that can be burned and used as a source of fuel.

Ubiquitous- Being or seeming to be everywhere at the same time; omnipresent. 

ENSC110 Agriculture 11