What percent of the Earth is used for agriculture?
· Half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. 2. This leaves only 37% for forests; 11% as shrubs and grasslands; 1% as freshwater coverage; and the remaining 1% – a much smaller share than many suspect – is built-up urban area which includes cities, towns, villages, roads and other human infrastructure.
What are the three resources used in agriculture?
Half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. 2. This leaves only 37% for forests; 11% as shrubs and grasslands; 1% as freshwater coverage; and the remaining 1% – a much smaller share than many suspect – is built-up urban area which includes cities, towns, villages, roads and other human infrastructure.
How can land be saved for agriculture?
How much of the earth’s land is used for agriculture? The global impact of farming on the environment is revealed in new maps, which show that 40 percent of the Earth’s land is now given over to agriculture.
What are the high inputs cost for agriculture?
Agricultural land (sq. km) Forest area (% of land area) Rural land area where elevation is below 5 meters (% of total land area) Urban land area where elevation is below 5 meters (% of total land area) Land area (sq. km) Urban land area where elevation is below 5 meters (sq. km)
How much percent does agriculture use?
Agriculture, food, and related industries contributed $1.055 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2020, a 5.0-percent share.
How much of US land is used for agriculture 2020?
roughly 52 percentAgricultural production is a major use of land, accounting for roughly 52 percent of the U.S. land base. (See data on Major Land Uses.)
How much of the US is agricultural land?
Farms and Land In 2017, the United States had just over 2 million farms, down 3.2 percent from 2012. These farms accounted for 900.2 million acres of land in farms, or 40 percent of all U.S. land. This was a decline of 14.3 million acres (1.6 percent) from the 2012 level.
What percent of land is owned by farmers?
California Farms and Farmers More than one quarter of California’s landmass is used for agriculture. Just over half of the 27.6 million acres of agricultural land is pasture and range and about 40 percent is cropland.
How much land in the U.S. is used for agriculture 2021?
This statistic shows the total farmland area in the United States from 2000 to 2021. In 2014, farms in the United States occupied a total area of approximately 913 million acres. By 2021, this amount decreased to about 895 million acres.
What state is number 1 in Agriculture?
Texas was by far the leading U.S. state in terms of total number of farms, with about 247 thousand farms by the end of 2021. Missouri was ranked second, among the leading ten states, with 95 thousand farms as of 2021.
Will there be enough food in the year 2050?
By 2050, with the global population expected to reach 9.8 billion, our food supplies will be under far greater stress. Demand will be 60% higher than it is today, but climate change, urbanization, and soil degradation will have shrunk the availability of arable land, according to the World Economic Forum.
Is 2000 acres a big farm?
Yes, 2,000 acres is a substantial amount of land, but it’s the scale at which most grain farmers have to operate in order to make a living thanks to small profit margins. In some cases it’s possible to make a living growing grains with fewer acres, which is what I’m trying to do on my own farm.
What percentage of land is used for agriculture?
Half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. 2. This leaves only 37% for forests; 11% as shrubs and grasslands; 1% as freshwater coverage; and the remaining 1% – a much smaller share than many suspect – is built-up urban area which includes cities, towns, villages, roads and other human infrastructure.
What are the two main uses of agricultural land?
There are two main uses of agricultural land: arable farming (which is land dedicated to growing crops), and pastureland ( which includes meadows and pastures used for livestock rearing). In the chart here we see a global map of land used for arable agriculture (as a share of total land area).
What is the agricultural area?
The agricultural area is the sum of arable land, permanent crops, permanent meadows and pastures.
How much land is there in the world?
The Land Area of the World is 13,003 million ha. 4,889 million ha are classified as ‘agricultural area’ by the FAO (this is 37.6% of the Land Area).
What is pastureland used for?
Pastureland (permanent meadows and pasture) For most countries, the majority of agricultural land is used for livestock rearing in the form of pastureland. In the map here we see the share of permanent meadows and pasture as a percentage of total land area.
What percentage of land is used for livestock grazing?
For most countries, land dedicated to cropland is typically below 20 percent , with many countries dedicating less than 10 percent. There are some notable exceptions, however; countries in South Asia and Europe allocate a large share of land area to arable farming. India, Bangladesh, Ukraine and Denmark all dedicated more than half of total land area to cropland in 2015.
What is cropland measured in?
This visualisation shows total cropland (which does not include land for grazing) over the long-term, measured in hectares.
How much land is used for agriculture?
Globally agricultural land area is approximately five billion hectares, or 38 percent of the global land surface. About one-third of this is used as cropland, while the remaining two-thirds consist of meadows and pastures) for grazing livestock.
What is the distribution of agricultural land?
Regional distribution of agricultural land use is a combination of local agri-climatic edaphic – soil –conditions, and socio-economic drivers. Averaged over the decade between 2007 and 2016, the largest share of agricultural land area was in Asia, accounting for 1.6 global hectares (gha) or 34 percent, followed by the Americas (1.2 gha, or 25 percent) and Africa (1.1 gha, 24 percent), with Europe and Oceania representing each about 9-10 percent of the total.
Which country has the most irrigated land?
The two countries with the largest irrigated cropland area were India and China, with about 68 Mha each, followed by the United States (27 Mha), Pakistan (20 Mha) and Iran (9 Mha).
Why is land important for agriculture?
Land – a notion which broadly includes climate, topography, vegetation, soils and other natural resources – is the basis for agriculture, and the interaction between these components is vital for determining the productivity and sustainability of agro-ecosystems. Especially in the face of climate change and variability, selecting the right land uses for given biophysical and socio-economic conditions is essential for minimizing land degradation, rehabilitating degraded land, ensuring the sustainable use of land resources, and maximizing resilience.
Which region has the most land area for irrigation?
In terms of irrigation capacity, the region with the largest land area equipped for irrigation over the past decade was by far Asia, with 237 mega hectares (mha), or 70 percent of the world’s total, followed by the Americas (52 mha, or 16 percent), Europe (26 mha, 8 percent), Africa (15 mha, 5 percent) and Oceania (3 mha, 1 percent).
What is the current percentage of land used by humans for agriculture?
Today, the world population uses approximately 50 percent of total habitable land for agriculture.
How land is used for agriculture?
Agricultural land is typically land devoted to agriculture, the systematic and controlled use of other forms of life—particularly the rearing of livestock and production of crops—to produce food for humans. permanent pastures: natural or artificial grasslands and shrublands able to be used for grazing livestock.
Which country has no agriculture land?
According to a recent World Bank report, the countries with the smallest percentages of land used for agriculture today include Suriname, Greenland, Singapore, the Bahamas, the Seychelles, and Norway.
Which country has the most land for agriculture?
Indonesia tops the chart showing countries with the largest overall area, with 225,000 square kilometres taken by permanent cropland, or 12.4% of its total. Second on the list is China, with 160,000 sq km – some 1.7% of its total land area.
How much land do humans occupy on Earth?
Human beings take up a lot of real estate — around 50-70 percent of the Earth’s land surface.
What percent of US land is used for agriculture?
Agricultural land (% of land area) in United States was reported at 44.36 % in 2018, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources.
How much land do humans occupy?
Subtracting this uninhabitable 57% (32,665,981 mi 2) from the total land area leaves 24,642,757 square miles or 15.77 billion acres of habitable land. Divide this figure by the current human population of 7 billion (that’s 7,000 million people) and you get 2.3 acres (about one hectare) per person.
How has technology impacted land use?
The rapid adoption of new technology, improved crop varieties, improved insect and disease control, and other changes have boosted agricultural productivity to the extent that more production can be obtained from the same cropland base.
Why is cropland acreage declining?
For example, wheat acreage has declined 52 percent from its historic high in the early 1980s, a trend attributable to a variety of factors, including a reduction in the relative profitability of wheat due to increased foreign competition, CRP participation in wheat-producing areas, and genetic refinements to corn and soybean varieties that allowed these crops to be planted in areas previously used primarily for wheat. In contrast, soybean acreage has more than doubled since the 1960s, primarily as a result of strong international demand, while corn acreage has also risen in recent years in response to policy-induced biofuel demand.
What are some regional changes in cropland used for crops?
Some regional changes in cropland used for crops represent year-to-year fluctuations that tend to balance out over time, but other areas (e.g. , the Northeast, Southeast, and Mountain regions) have experienced clear long-term declines.
Why does land use change?
Land-use change occurs for a variety of reasons. Changing commodity and timber prices, agricultural and natural resource policies, urban pressure, and environmental factors ( e.g., droughts) prompt private landowners to shift land to uses that maximize economic returns.
What is land dedicated to special uses?
Land dedicated to special uses, which includes land in State/national parks and wilderness areas, has increased substantially since the MLU series began 1945. Urban land use has also increased, albeit more modestly, as population and economic growth spur demand for new housing and other forms of development.
What are the three land types?
Although the shares of land in different uses have fluctuated to some degree over time, land area in the top three categories (grassland pasture and range, forest, and cropland) has remained relatively stable. Land dedicated to special uses, which includes land in State/national parks and wilderness areas, has increased substantially since …
Is land use change bidirectional?
While land-use change can be bidirectional for some uses —such as forestry, grassland, and cropland—conversions to an urban use are typically irreversible. As part of the Major Land Uses program, ERS analyzes trends in all of these uses and examines factors driving broad land-use patterns and trends.
How does agriculture affect the environment?
U.S. agricultural production relies heavily on the Nation’s land, water, and other natural resources, and has a direct impact on the quality of the Nation’s natural environment. Over the years, significant improvement in the sector’s productive use of resources has reduced the amount of land and water needed per unit of output, and concerted public and private efforts have greatly improved the sector’s environmental performance. These charts document several aspects of these trends.
How does agriculture produce methane?
In agriculture, crop and livestock activities emit nitrous oxide and methane, mainly from fertilizer application, enteric fermentation (a normal digestive process in animals that produces methane), and manure storage and management. GHG emissions from agriculture have increased by approximately 10 percent since 1990.
How many acres were there in 2012?
The 2012 U.S. land area amounted to nearly 2.3 billion acres, with nearly 1.2 billion acres in agricultural use. The share of the land base in agricultural use declined from 63 percent in 1949 to 52 percent in 2012, the latest year for which comprehensive national data are available.
What is an agricultural easement?
Agricultural easements provide long-term protection for agricultural land and wetlands. The Regional Conservation Partners Program coordinates conservation program assistance with partners to solve problems on a regional or watershed scale.
What is USDA conservation?
USDA conservation efforts rely mainly on voluntary incentive programs to address natural resource issues. The Conservation Reserve Program pays farmers to remove environmentally sensitive land from production and encourages partial field practices including grass waterways and riparian buffers. Working-land programs provide technical and financial assistance to farmers who install or maintain conservation practices on land in production (e.g., nutrient management, conservation tillage, and field-edge filter strips). Agricultural easements provide long-term protection for agricultural land and wetlands. The Regional Conservation Partners Program coordinates conservation program assistance with partners to solve problems on a regional or watershed scale.
Where is CRP land located?
A large share of CRP land was located in the Plains (from Texas to Montana), where rainfall is limited and much of the land is subject to potentially severe wind erosion. Smaller concentrations of CRP land were found in eastern Washington, southern Iowa, northern Missouri, and the Mississippi Delta. Previous. Page: 1 of 1.
What is agricultural land?
Agricultural land includes: – Arable land (cropland) used for crop production (usually with suitable soil conditions for crop production) Of the land used for crops, some types of crops such as wheat, maize, rice and barley take up much more total and proportional cropland than others.
How many types of land use are there in the US?
The US Department of Agriculture has identified six major types of land use in the US.
What are the benefits of forest land?
In general, forest land offers benefits including but not limited to: – providing much of the world’s biodiversity. – the trees in a forest produce oxygen, but also act as a carbon sink. – contribute to soil health, water quality, and other ecosystem support functions.
Which country uses less land for forestry?
On the country, the wikipedia.org and soe.environment.gov.au resources show that Australia and the United States use different proportions of land for forestry (both native and plantation forests). Australia uses far less.
What are the major uses of land in the United States?
Major Uses Of Land In The United States. Using the United States as one example of what a country uses it’s land for, pasture/rangeland, forest and cropland are the major land uses in the US across all States, in terms of total acreage. Special use, miscellaneous and urban came in third through sixth.
What makes up the same proportions of the world’s total land use?
Agricultural land, forest land and ‘other’ land all make up around the same proportions of the world’s total land uses
Which land use is the predominant land use for habitable land?
Agriculture is the predominant land use for habitable land by far, followed by forests, and then shrubland.
How much of the world’s crop calories are eaten by humans?
Just 55% of the world’s crop calories are directly eaten by people. Just 55 percent of the world’s crop calories are actually eaten directly by people. Another 36 percent is used for animal feed. And the remaining 9 percent goes toward biofuels and other industrial uses.
How can farmers increase agricultural productivity?
Farmers could increase agricultural productivity by boosting crop yields — either through new farming techniques or through improved crop genetics. But even if the rapid rate of improvement in crop yields over the 20th century continued, that still wouldn’t produce enough food for everyone. Another possibility, as the map above shows, is …
Where did the map of the world come from?
The map itself comes from Jonathan Foley’s fascinating, visually rich exploration in National Geographic of how we can possibly feed everyone as the world’s population grows from 7 billion today to 9 billion by mid-century. (Foley directs the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment .)
What percentage of soy goes to animal feed?
By contrast, more than 67 percent of crops — particularly all the soy grown in the Midwest — goes to animal feed. And a portion of the rest goes to ethanol and other biofuels. Some of that animal feed eventually becomes food, obviously — but it’s a much, much more indirect process. It takes about 100 calories of grain to produce just 12 calories …
Is animal feed efficient?
And animal feed is also an inefficient way of feeding people — about one-tenth as efficient, on a calorie basis, as eating crops directly. One implication of that is that, as countries like China and India grow and consume more milk and meat, the pressure on global farmland will grow.
How much land is ideal for farming?
Just 17% of American land is ideal for farming. We don’t have that much to lose! The amount of the best land lost is about equal to California’s entire Central Valley.
Where is 10% of the world’s arable acres?
10% of the world’s arable acres lie within the United States.
What does it mean when a farmland rating is 0.65?
If farmland has a rating above that – say, 0.65 – that makes it great farmland. Below that, and it’s subpar. Farmland with a high rating is being lost disproportionately quickly, which means suboptimal farmland will have to be used. And suboptimal farmland requires more water, more transportation, more energy, more fertilizers, …
What is the most important factor that caused the loss of farmland?
It probably comes as no surprise that the expansion of cities and suburbs are responsible for most of the loss in farmland. But 41% of the lost acres actually came from development in rural areas.
Why is farmland being lost?
And, of course, some of the farmland being lost is for so-called “specialty” crops, like fruits and vegetables. But there are other reasons as well. Development on farmland can have negative effects, removing land that animals use as a habitat. Well-operated farms care for the soil, air, and water, and produce viable ecosystems.
Why is farmland less important than food?
This is concerning for a variety of reasons. The obvious one is that farmland produces food, so less farmland means the price of food may rise . The majority of American farmland is devoted to commodity crops – soy, corn, wheat – and many of the uses of those crops are not for direct eating.
When was agricultural land converted to urban land?
This image, courtesy of American Farmland Trust, shows the conversion of agricultural land to urban and low-density residential development between 1992 and 2012.
