So, if most people are going vegan, there would be much more space for other stuff, yes?
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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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.
Tobacco is still at least 2,000x too big.
Man that guy Urban needs so many houses... What does he even do with them all?
Fuck golf
Ban golf and replace all courses with public housing
Yeah that land could be used for more christmas trees
So nice of the 100 largest land owning families to have the same amount of land as the entire urban or rural housing population of the rest of the country. I assume it's to fatten themselves up for the rest of us just like the cows.
When do we get to eat them again?
Shit I'm hungry now I'll start the smoker
Defense is a surprisingly large use of land. How is that? Can anyone explain the most land intensive uses of the Armed Forces? Like tank training areas maybe?
Mikitary bases are pretty big. Air force, army, national guard, naval air stations, naval bases, there is a lot going on there.
Can't forget that military bases are communities where people live, too. Not just barracks and mess halls for individuals, but there are full neighborhoods and shopping centers for families.*
*My knowledge on this is limited, I just remember visiting a family member on base when I was younger.
This is correct
Gotta see one of these with parking.
It would be a subset of "urban commercial", right? Somewhere in the range of half to three-quarters of it?
Depends how these are defined. Public parking or on-street parking are likely in a different category, not to mention people's driveways.
Get rid of livestock
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.
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Golf is way too big, imo. No other sport even makes the list here.
Maybe we can combine it with "wildfires".
Food we eat is sepperate from cow pastures...
Nice!
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), and ultimately 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.
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Can we put the 100 largest landowning families in Florida, then saw it off from the rest of the country?
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And people will still say that the meat/dairy industry aren't a plague
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I have certainly heard of Weyerhauser, but had no idea they were that big. They're the only 'individual' owner shown. The land-owning families is odd as I'm sure it overlaps a lot with pasture and private timberland.
They have rights to nearly all the timberland in washington, which covers about half the state. They're unbelievably huge, it's ridiculous.
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.
Too cold or not enough warm.
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
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.
It us wild that there is not a need. Distribution is (or was) the issue. Very sad humans refuse to feed others.
"Wildfires" is a surprisingly large area. I wonder what the 2025 area for it is.
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