Agriculture, crops and land cover — represented through the energy-modelling abstraction and bounded by the CLEWs land-use constraints.
The land/food subsystem represents how British Columbia's land is allocated among crops and competing uses, and the agricultural inputs that go with them. The clever design choice in this CLEWs implementation is that land is modelled with the same primitives as energy: a parcel of land is a TECHNOLOGY, the way it is used (which crop, which practice) is a MODE_OF_OPERATION, and crop products and land area flow as FUEL commodities.
TotalAnnualTechnologyActivityByMode plus constraints LU1–LU4 bound land-use activity per mode in level (max/min area) and in year-on-year rate of change (how fast a land use may expand or contract).From the wiki naming conventions and FUEL.csv:
Land and sector tags: LND LandAGR Agricultural sectorCRP… Crop commodityBIO Biomass
| To | Linkage |
|---|---|
| Water | Irrigation demand (AGRWATBC1) — crops draw surface/groundwater |
| Energy | Agricultural energy inputs: AGRDSL, AGRNGS, AGRELCB02; bioenergy crops feed energy supply |
| Climate | Farm machinery and land conversion emissions via EmissionActivityRatio |
Land data comes from the GAEZ (Global Agro-Ecological Zoning) model via agglomerative hierarchical clustering of land with similar achievable yield. BC is split into 7 clustered zones; 9 crops covering ~90% of production (alfalfa, barley, maize, oat, pea, potato, rapeseed, rye, wheat) are explicit, the rest grouped as "other".