Long supply chains burden the climate and are not always reliable, which is why the call for regional food production is getting louder. Theoretically, that would even be feasible in this country, as a new study using the example of Hesse shows. According to this, the federal state could in theory provide itself completely with food – but only if the entire population changes their eating habits towards significantly more vegetables and less meat.
Whether strawberries from Spain, beef from the Netherlands or bananas from Colombia: many of our groceries have to travel long distances before they end up on our supermarket shelves. But this means that the production and transport of food alone causes a third of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions. An alternative could be a return to local farming and livestock farming in the region. But is that even possible?
Too few pastures and fields
Anna-Mara Schön and Marita Böhringer from the Fulda University of Applied Sciences have now checked for the first time how self-sufficient Germany is and chose the federal state of Hesse as a model case. To do this, they first determined how much space would theoretically be necessary to satisfy the current consumption habits of the local population. The result: In order to feed an average Hessian, you currently need 767 square meters of pasture land per capita and a lot more arable land.
But this calculation doesn’t add up because in Hesse there are just 467 square meters of pasture land per capita. “Thus, under the current conditions, it is not possible to convert the food system from industrialized agriculture to rural agriculture on a larger scale,” Schön concludes. But that doesn’t mean that the state of Hesse’s self-sufficiency is automatically doomed to fail.
More vegetables than keys
What would happen, for example, if all residents of Hesse changed their diet overnight and ate more plant-based foods and less meat? That would save a lot of land for fodder cultivation. Schön and Böhringer also calculated this scenario. They chose the so-called Planetary Health Diet as the average diet. This provides for a healthy diet that at the same time protects the planet’s resources. Specifically, the current proportion of vegetables and fruit in the diet will double, while the consumption of meat and sugar will be halved.
If everyone in Hesse were to eat accordingly, only half of the current 125,000 dairy cows and only a fifth of the fattening pigs would be needed, as the researchers report. According to this, a single cow could provide 90 people with meat and dairy products at once instead of the previous 17. This also has consequences for the area of ​​pasture land and for the cultivation of animal feed that is required per person. This drops from 767 to 128 square meters. In addition, there is 482 square meters of arable land per capita, while theoretically even 648 square meters would be available. Conversely, this means: “If all residents of Hesse were fed according to the Planetary Health Diet, the resources would be sufficient,” report Schön and Böhringer.
Crop rotation creates variety
But this vision of the future has a big catch. Although everyone would have enough, people would not live a really balanced and healthy life because the currently cultivated crops simply do not allow for this. However, this hurdle could be overcome in an even more utopian scenario, as Schön and Böhringer explain. In this scenario, all Hessian farmers would change their cultivation methods to a seven-year crop rotation. Different crops would then be grown in the same field every year, and after seven years the sequence would eventually be repeated.
The researchers came to the conclusion that with this type of cultivation everyone could be provided with varied, healthy food. At the same time, the scenario provides even better housing conditions for the animals. They would have more space and a more species-appropriate life. In addition, these utopian scenarios can possibly even be applied to the whole of Germany. “Since the current eating habits in other regions are comparable, we assume that our data can also be transferred to many other regions with similar consumption patterns,” says Schön.
Source: Fulda University; Specialist article: Sustainability, doi: 10.3390/su15118675