Livestock: option or necessity ? Changes of energy and water flows in an Indian village, 1950-2022

Résumé En

Since the 1950’s, agriculture in India has undergone many ‘revolutions’. In Anantapur, a dryland area in Southern India, the Yellow, Green and White revolutions focused on boosting the production of groundnut, rice and milk respectively. Those revolutions have not impacted farms in the same way but the role of livestock has changedsubstantially, modifying the circularity of energy at different levels. We combine the comparative agriculture and the territorial metabolism approaches to study the energy and water transition of the agriculture of a village in Southern India from the 1950’s to today. For both time steps we look at changes of energy and water flows at farm and territorial levels, assessing the size and nature of the flows of energy (human and animal labour, gross energy of biomass and fossil energies) entering, circulating and exiting the farm and the territory an also the net groundwater recharge at farm and territorial-level. We rely on a cycling index to estimate the proportion of total internal flows among the total flows involved. Circularity of energy within farms has declined but has been reshaped at the scale of the territory. While energy flows are at both periods driven to a large extent by livestock, the nature of circularity has been modified by the use of fossil fuels. In the 1950’s circularity and livestock was a sine qua non for agricultural production: livestock served for ploughing, lifting water for irrigation, producing food and manure. Today flows of energy are an outlet of agricultural production: livestock "as a whole" is no longer a necessity but rather an option for farms aiming to specialise in either milk or meat production. Furthermore, a new (non-conscious) form of exploitation has emerged between production systems recharging the groundwater table and others pumping it. In the current configuration, livestock is fed partly on co-products thus fuelling the circularity of the territory. But as the cultivation of crops requires fuel and electricity, the current circularity depends on ‘pulses’ of external fossil energy to be maintained. We therefore show that livestockbased circularity is not always an indicator of sustainable land-use.