• Ledericas@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      if its alafalfa, i think alot of farm land are, its usually exported to the Middle east.

    • kersploosh@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • MNByChoice@midwest.social
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      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

      • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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.

  • MisterScruffy@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    Can we put the 100 largest landowning families in Florida, then saw it off from the rest of the country?

  • litchralee@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • troybot [he/him]@midwest.social
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • str82L @lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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?

    • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      OIL. There’s a LOT of land that might be considered cow/grazing but won’t really grow anything worth it. See West Texas.

  • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      It would be a subset of “urban commercial”, right? Somewhere in the range of half to three-quarters of it?

  • aphonefriend@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    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?