The Green Revolution
In the 1950s and 1960s, agriculture underwent a drastic transformation commonly referred to as the Green
Revolution. The Green Revolution resulted in the industrialization of agriculture. Part of the advance resulted
from new hybrid food plants, leading to more productive food crops. Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green
Revolution transformed agriculture around the globe, world grain production increased by 250%.
That is a tremendous increase in the amount of food energy available for human consumption. This additional energy did not come from an increase in incipient sunlight, nor did it result from introducing agriculture to new vistas of land. The energy for the Green Revolution was provided by fossil fuels. The Green Revolution was made possible by fossil fuel based fertilizers and pesticides, and hydrocarbon fueled irrigation.
The Green Revolution increased the energy flow to agriculture by an average of 50 times the energy input of
traditional agriculture.
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Agricultural energy consumption is broken down as follows:
• 31% for the manufacture of inorganic fertilizer
• 19% for the operation of field machinery
• 16% for transportation
• 13% for irrigation
• 08% for raising livestock (not including livestock feed)
• 05% for crop drying
• 05% for pesticide production
• 08% miscellaneous
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Using the low figure of 1.4 liters diesel equivalent per kilogram of nitrogen, this equates to the energy content of 15.3 billion liters of diesel fuel, or 4.04 billion gallons. Of course this is only a rough comparison to aid comprehension of the energy requirements for modern agriculture. In a very real sense, we are eating fossil fuels. However, due to the laws of thermodynamics, there is not a direct correspondence between energy inflow and outflow in agriculture. Along the way, there is a marked energy loss. Between 1945 and 1994 energy input to agriculture increased 4-fold while crop yields only
increased 3-fold.
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