The Nordic food system
The Nordic countries are part of a highly globalized food system with resource-intense consumption patterns, e.g., meat consumption in the Nordic countries is around double the global average. Due to the large Danish pork industry, the region is also a net exporter of meat. Within the region, Denmark is the only country with net export of agricultural commodities, while the other countries are net food importers (FAO 2017). A relatively small proportion of the total land area (3–8%) is used for agricultural production in all countries except Denmark (~ 50%). Specialist dairy farming (Fig. 1) is the most economically important farm enterprise in Finland, Norway, and Sweden, while specialist pig production is the most prominent enterprise in economic terms in Denmark. Due to the harsh weather and topography in Norway, specialist sheep farms are also common, utilizing remote pastures in hilly areas. All the Nordic countries have experienced an increase in average farm size in recent decades due to smallholders ceasing operations and merging into larger farms (Eurostat 2016). However, smallholders are still relatively important in Norway. At the national level in all countries, only 2–3% of the total workforce is employed in agriculture. The emissions of methane and nitrous oxide from agriculture constitute a considerable part of total national greenhouse gas emissions; 8, 9, 13, and 19% in Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark, respectively. Ammonia emissions, mainly from livestock manure, account for approximately 90% of total ammonia emissions in the Nordic countries (Antman et al. 2015). The Baltic Sea, which Sweden, Finland, and Denmark border, is heavily affected by eutrophication due to nutrient pollutants lost from agriculture.
Stakeholder engagement process
Based on the methodologies presented by Volkery et al. (2008) and Mauser et al. (2013), an iterative stakeholder integration process was employed to design and model the future food vision for the Nordic countries. The process followed the three principal steps suggested by Mauser et al. (2013) to define normative decisions describing the food vision and translate these decisions into quantitative model inputs. The NGOs provided the creative input when defining normative decisions, while the researchers were responsible for translating the normative decisions into quantitative model inputs and running the model. The process was iterated until a compelling and reasonable set of decisions and model outputs was obtained.
The group of NGOs participating in the study was a rather homogeneous group consisting of five environmental and small-scale farmers’ organizations: Miljøbevægelsen NOAH (Denmark), Frie Bønder - Levende Land (Denmark), Uusimaa Region of Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (Finland), Norsk Bonde-og Småbrukarlag (Norway), and The Air Pollution and Climate Secretariat (Sweden) (hereafter “the NGOs”). They had previously worked together on food system sustainability (see Antman et al. 2015) and had already started to define common interpretations of problems and potential solutions in the area. With this said, each NGO entered into the process with different agendas and local knowledge.
The first step in the process involved initial communications between the researchers and the NGOs in which the overall aim, framing, and initial pre-conditions for the work were decided (see Sect. 2.3). This was followed by collaborative data acquisition and method development (see Sect. 2.4). Collection of data was facilitated by the NGOs’ networks in their home countries. In late October 2016, a first workshop involving the researchers and representatives of the NGOs was held in Oslo, where the researchers presented the methodological approach and preliminary model results. Questions regarding what a future sustainable food system should comprise were discussed and key normative decisions were determined (see Sect. 2.3). During this workshop, each NGO provided insights into the political discourse in their respective home country, information which was used to frame the work in a way that was relevant for each of the participating NGOs. Furthermore, the NGOs provided local knowledge on agricultural practices and particularities in their respective home country.
The first workshop was followed by continued method development and modeling work where the decisions made were fed back into the model. This resulted in a draft project report containing the methodology and results.
In early 2017, the NGOs organized four workshops, one in each of the case countries, and invited participants from a broad spectrum of stakeholders, including representatives from farmers’ unions, producers, retailers, government agencies, and environmental organizations. The participants had the opportunity to read the draft project report beforehand. During the workshops, they were given a presentation on the main results, which they were asked to discuss and respond to. After the workshops, the researchers and NGOs reviewed the outcomes and lessons learnt, which were fed back into the process of framing the work. Some methodological issues identified during the workshops were also discussed and resolved.
A final step in the participatory process is co-dissemination of results, where findings are openly discussed among participants and other stakeholder groups, and results are published through channels relevant for all participating parties (Mauser et al. 2013). This was done through a co-authored report published by the Nordic Council of Ministers in late 2017 (Karlsson et al. 2017), and the findings were also discussed at the COP 23 meeting in Bonn in November 2017. At the time of writing, a series of debate articles in the different countries has been authored by the NGOs and submitted to relevant newspapers and a final workshop is planned.
Normative choices in developing the future food vision
This section provides some details on the background to the normative decisions made and the discussions leading to these. The aim is to give an understanding of the ideological views and opinions behind the decisions which shaped the results and conclusions of this modeling study. Key normative decisions and their implications on the modeled scenario are summarized in Fig. 2 and further details can be found in Karlsson et al. (2017).
Early in the process, it was decided that the food vision should depict a future where food is produced mainly through agriculture and not in highly technical landless systems (Muller et al. 2017). Furthermore, one key concept used by the NGOs was that of agroecology (Wezel et al. 2009). One important aspect of agroecology as interpreted by the NGOs was to attempt to re-establish the link between available local resources, food production, and diets consumed. From this, it emerged that food systems need to be re-localized and the reliance on food imports reduced. However, limited imports of tropical fruits, tea, coffee, and chocolate were included in the scenario, as these cannot be produced in the region. Livestock, especially grazing livestock, were considered a vital component in re-localizing the food system, through their ability to utilize local pasture resources, and also by-products from food processing, to produce food. Livestock production should hence not be reliant upon imported feed or compete with local plant-based food production, but instead rely on “leftover streams,” i.e., biomass not consumed by humans, a concept referred to as “default livestock” (Van Zanten et al. 2018). The leftover streams available as livestock feed in this study were
Semi-natural pastures and Norwegian outfield areas (i.e., forest and mountainous pastures, not counted as agricultural land), where grazing can promote biodiversity and annual cropping is unfeasible
Perennial grass or grass/clover mixtures (referred to as ley) grown in crop rotations to facilitate biological nitrogen fixation and control of weeds
By-products from food processing unfit or unwanted for human consumption
In Norway, pasture resources outside the areas defined as agricultural land (outfield areas) were considered a resource base for grazing livestock. Outfield areas are currently an important part of Norway’s animal husbandry and were considered by the NGOs to be a vital domestic resource that should be utilized for food production.
Together, these leftover streams represented the base upon which livestock production was performed in the future food vision. This limited meat, milk, and egg production to regionally available resources that were not in competition with plant-based food production. However, to enable a large utilization rate of pasture resources and by-products, this normative choice necessitated animal production systems with low productivity compared with current levels.
Another aspect of agroecology suggested for inclusion in the future vision by the NGOs was use of organic farming practices, such as exclusion of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. This decision led to modeled crop rotations with a large share of grass-legume leys to supply biological nitrogen fixation and to limit pests and weeds, limitations on some crops prone to disease if grown too frequently and also reduced per hectare crop yield (for most crops) compared with current conventional farming practices.
To promote biodiversity in agricultural landscapes, the NGOs decided to set aside 15% of arable land in Denmark for nature conservation. In the other countries, agriculture is a minor land user, which is why this was only applied to the Danish case. The NGOs also decided that semi-natural pastures should be grazed by livestock to prevent them from reverting to natural vegetation, an outcome which would lead to loss of many endangered species that are dependent upon semi-natural pastures.
It was decided that the diets should be based on the type of food currently consumed in the region and seek to fulfill Nordic nutrition recommendations (Nordic Council of Ministers 2014). Therefore, a sample diet produced by the Swedish National Food Agency (Enghardt-Barbieri and Lindvall 2003) was used as a “baseline” diet from which the scenario diets were developed. This baseline diet was based on current Swedish consumption patterns but adjusted to conform to nutrient recommendations. Reduced consumption of animal products compared with the baseline diet was replaced with plant-based counterparts (i.e., cereals, grain legumes, and vegetable oil) to provide the same amount of energy and to meet fat and protein requirements according to the Nordic nutrition recommendations. Dietary carbohydrate content and intake of 20 vitamins and minerals were also assessed and compared to recommendations.
The current levels of food waste were considered unsustainable, and it was agreed that future scenarios for food production should include reduced food waste. Avoidable food waste at the retail and consumer stage of the food chain was therefore assumed to be halved compared with current levels of waste, which is also in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12, Target 12.3.
Regarding the energy system, it was decided that the vision should depict fossil-free agriculture. This was enabled through the use of non-food biomass (i.e., wastes, manure, straw, and grass legume leys) for bioenergy production. There was some skepticism among the NGOs about the use of agricultural biomass for bioenergy production and some had previously campaigned actively against the use of arable land for energy production, due to its competition with food production. However, they agreed that limited bioenergy production to cater for energy needs within the agricultural sector was acceptable.
In light of a changing climate and uncertainties in future agricultural productivity in many parts of the world, it was agreed that, instead of restricting food production to the need of the local population, the focus should be on the maximum food production potential based on local resources, in order to feed as many as possible.
Modeling the future food vision
An adapted and extended version of the bottom-up agricultural mass flow model from Röös et al. (2016) was used to model the impacts of the future food vision on (1) food production including nutrient content in resulting diets, (2) land use, and (3) GHG emissions. Modeling was performed separately for each country. The model tracks mass flows between four main subsystems (crop production, animal production, bioenergy production, and food processing and consumption) and includes 16 crop groups (e.g., cereals, rapeseed, cabbage, potatoes, ley, etc.), 5 animal species (dairy cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, and aquaculture), and 32 different food items (e.g., cereals, vegetable oil, cabbage, cheese, fish, etc.). The nutrient content of the resulting diets was analyzed with the DietistNet software, using the Swedish National Food Agency’s food database. The global warming potential (GWP) was calculated for the GHG methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide over a 100-year timeframe, according to the 5th IPCC assessment report (IPCC 2013).
Emissions were assessed from cradle to farm gate, thus excluding emissions generated in post-harvest transport, processing, and storage. Changes in soil carbon stocks in arable soil were modeled using the Introductory Carbon Balance Model (ICBM, Andrén et al. 2004) for the Swedish case only due to data limitations and presented separately. Average carbon sequestration (or emission) rates were calculated over a 100-year timeframe. Agricultural energy expenditure was accounted for in the model, and biomass was allocated for bioenergy to provide for farm energy needs. Farmyard manure, food, and slaughterhouse wastes, together with straw and ley, were used as feedstocks, and the digestate was used as fertilizer. For a more detailed description of the model and impact assessment, please see Karlsson et al. (2017).
The area needed to produce all plant-based food in the baseline diet and the bioenergy crops, feed crops, and additional food crops needed to replace reduced consumption of animal products was calculated using national statistics on crop yields. Since data were not available for organic production of all crop groups in all countries, conventional yields were used and the yield gap between conventional and organic farming was accounted for using literature values from de Ponti et al. (2012). Land use for imported food was calculated using global average yield levels according to FAOSTAT.
All crops (except greenhouse horticulture and apple orchards) were grown in crop rotations containing at least one-third grass-legume leys (i.e., ley grown for 2 years in a 6-year rotation), which is recommended for good nitrogen supply and for preventing agricultural pest problems (i.e., weeds, arthropods, and diseases). Ley yield data were taken from national statistics and adjusted for statistical bias using results from Swedish ley field experiments. Limitations in terms of harsh winters and short growing seasons in the northern parts of the Nordic countries and how often specific crops can be incorporated in the crop rotation to avoid build-up of pests were accounted for by limiting cultivation of rapeseed and grain legumes to the southern parts of the countries and restricting their cultivation frequency.
Food chain by-products unfit or unwanted for human consumption were used as animal feed. These were rapeseed cake from vegetable oil production, low-grade roots and potatoes, residue cereal bran, bakery wastes, spent grains from beer production, fiber and molasses from sugar production, and fishmeal from gutting and cleaning.
Livestock herd structures and allocation of feed resources (by-products, grass feed, and feed grains grown on arable land) were identified using a non-linear optimization algorithm described in Karlsson et al. (2017). The model included five livestock systems: (1) low-yielding dairy systems relying on pasture resources to a large extent, (2) lamb production where lambs are reared on pastures during summer and slaughtered in the autumn, (3) organic pork production with access to pastures on arable land, (4) dual-purpose poultry producing eggs and also meat by rearing cockerels, and (5) land-based fish farming using Nile tilapia that can be reared on plant-based feed. For details, see Karlsson et al. (2017).