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Where’s the amounts used strictly for cars?
The black lines used for borders could be that. I’m not saying it is, just that it might be close to the amount used by roads other than rural highways.
Yeah Maine is so well known for it’s urban housing
And Nevada for its timberland.
This makes my eyes bleed
Tobacco is still at least 2,000x too big.
It’s quite interesting that “rural highways” is one of the categories identified, but not any other sort of improved road. The data source has a base granularity where one square is 250,000 acres (~100,000 hectares), and then additional state data is factored in for increased precision. It supposingly being USDA data, they might primarily care only about those highways used to connect farms to the national markets.
That said, I would be keenly interested in the land used for low-volume, residential streets that support suburban and rural sprawl, in comparison to streets in urban areas. Unlike highways which provides fast connectivity, and unlike dense urban-core streets that produce value by hosting local businesses and serving local residents, suburban streets take up space, intentional break connectivity (ie cul de sacs), return very little in value to anyone except to the adjacent homeowners, essentially as extensions of their privately-owned driveways.
It may very well be in USDA’s interest to collect data on suburban sprawl, as much of the land taken for such developments was perfectly good, arable land.
I love this visualization and for some reason your comment made me also wish we had this data correlated with the water usage for each land use category.
There’d be a square or two which just say “Nestlé” lol
Why do they keep allocating land to wildfires if they’re so destructive? /s
That’s the federal wildfire sanctuary established by president William McKinney. While most fire has been domesticated, the remaining feral fire is allowed to burn free in Utah.
I heard that even though the fire was born here, it has illegal flameborn parents so they’re going to put it on a cargo ship with a bunch of pallets and deport it and that’s how we’ll solve the wildfire issue. Saw it on Joe rogan
Can’t rake everywhere all the time
Do we not eat any of the cows?
Vegans and ecologists have been talking about this exact issue for a while now
literally decades. lots of talk around the conditions that bring new pandemics too.
It simply takes a loooot of food to produce 1kg of beef
I expect a substantial portion of that cow pasture/range land is dry grasslands and shrub steppe out west. It’s rough terrain and not good for much else. A lot of it doesn’t even have cows on it most of the time.
if its alafalfa, i think alot of farm land are, its usually exported to the Middle east.
It seems a little inefficient to put all the airports together
Its really not so bad once you get over the 12 hour drive.
Golf is way too big, imo. No other sport even makes the list here.
Maybe we can combine it with “wildfires”.
“Wildfires” is a surprisingly large area. I wonder what the 2025 area for it is.
Can’t figure out why the 100 largest landowning families aren’t using their land for any of the other reasons. Surely some of them are having it farmed for them too?
Swamps don’t make good farms, but some people try to farm in FL, it’s just inefficient and heavily pollutes or eliminates wetlands
OIL. There’s a LOT of land that might be considered cow/grazing but won’t really grow anything worth it. See West Texas.
Remember, not all land is the same. Some is too dry to grow human food. Some too wet. There are also other things that land is either too or not enough.
I bet we could still multiply output by a decent number by replacing meat production with directly edible crops, if there was a need for it
It us wild that there is not a need. Distribution is (or was) the issue. Very sad humans refuse to feed others.
Most pasture/grazing land simply isn’t suitable for crop farming, which is why we use it for pasture. Be it because of water retention or lacking topsoil or whatever, it’s often the case that the only feasible way to produce food from an area is livestock farming.
The “livestock feed” section of the graph looks more than twice as big as “Food we eat”, and at least some of the pasture land (much larger than both) has got to be viable, even if it mostly isn’t.
Sure, and there’s a very important discussion to be had about the influence livestock has on the environment. But that’s a separate topic from the usefulness of pasture land for alternate purposes.
and somebody owns every square inch of it.
I think the graphic would be better if some of the data were nested by size and relationship. IOW Agricultural land would have grazing, food production, feed production, etc. in decreasing size nested over an area. Might give greater sense of how much land is used for ag. Same for forestry; Forestry, parks, commercial logging, etc.
So, if most people are going vegan, there would be much more space for other stuff, yes?
