
How America Uses Its Land - Alex3917
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
======
rayiner
The one third being used for cows is misleading. Pasture is basically the
Bureau of Land Management’s default use for the vast swaths of federal land.
It’s like “here is this land, you’re allowed to graze on it with a permit.”
That doesn’t produce that many cows—it’s more about politics and the fact that
much of the land is good for little else besides growing grass.

The real land use from growing meat comes from the land used to grow the corn
that feeds the cows. In the article, that’s counted as agricultural land, not
pasture.

~~~
justinwp
>Pasture is basically the Bureau of Land Management’s default use for the vast
swaths of federal land. It’s like “here is this land, you’re allowed to graze
on it with a permit.” That doesn’t produce that many cows...

And yet it is an incredibly destructive use of land for so few cows. BLM land
is often shrubby desert and is not able to cope with the impacts of the cows
and remain a healthy ecosystem.

~~~
adbge
I have the opposite impression, that the grazing of cows on this land is
beneficial as it mimics the role the buffalo formerly played.

~~~
cco
If and only if it's done correctly. Both the above statement and yours are
true, it really depends a lot on how it's done.

In most cases it's not done well.

~~~
xapata
To be more specific, the cows should take a bite and move on. This keeps the
grass short, but doesn't kill it. With short grass, predators can see prey
easier, so birds can eat and deposit droppings to add more nitrogen to the
soil.

~~~
insensible
We can simulate buffalo mob grazing with "managed intensive grazing": many
cows in a small area for about a day, then they move. In addition to what you
said, it manures the land quite evenly. The grass can stay in its fastest-
growing "adolescent" stage. Builds topsoil quickly and sequesters unbelievable
amounts of carbon. (This is _not_ how most beef is raised.)

~~~
yellowapple
"This is not how most beef is raised."

It's how most beef _should_ be raised, though, IMO.

Unfortunately, if we were to take all the cows stuck in factory farms and turn
them loose on BLM land, I somehow doubt there would be enough food out there
for them.

~~~
insensible
Grass-feed cattle farmers tell me it takes almost exactly the same amount of
land to graze cows as it does to grow the grain to feed them in a feedlot, so
that would be a direction to look: replacing grain farming with ecological
grazing.

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hirundo
> More than one-third of U.S. land is used for pasture ... There’s a single,
> major occupant on all this land: cows.

Not here. I live on cow range land, but the cattle are outnumbered by elk. The
elk hunting industry here is larger than the cattle industry. Every third
local seems to be a hunting guide, and many of those are cow growers too.

This seems to me to be a very positive thing that should be encouraged.
Instead of buying all their meat at the local supermarket meat counter
thousands of city dwellers dream of the hunt. They buy expensive equipment and
tags then come out here and work their asses off for a chance.

Why would anyone spend that much and work that hard for an uncertain outcome
unless it was fulfilling in some way? It sure doesn't save money on meat.
Hunting forces you to commune with nature, dressing and hauling out your kill
rubs your nose in it. It forces you to own responsibility for killing your
dinner. Paying the blood price carries meaning that paying $/lb for a BOGO
does not.

If we can arrange for more people to harvest their own meat rather than
accepting an industrial commodity, more people would have a greater love and
understanding of nature, more respect for themselves, and more meaning in
their lives. In many places it's a superior use of the range.

~~~
bscphil
Having people travel to hunt the meat they eat doesn't scale, though, at all.
It's quite simply not possible to use it as a way to improve land use and
reduce climate change. Suggestions like yours can be good, but they don't
recognize the scale of the changes that are needed. It's the equivalent of
trying to get people to buy hybrids to stop climate change - even if everyone
could do it, it wouldn't make a dent in the problem.

Even given that hunting provides some kind of spiritual value (which I must
admit I'm very skeptical of), it's a value only available to those who are by
any reasonable standard quite wealthy (excepting rural people). It takes a lot
of time, costs more, and is hard work that a lot of people aren't capable of.
A marked increase in demand would make this even more of a problem.

>It forces you to own responsibility for killing your dinner.

I wonder if, faced with this choice, most people would not simply become
vegetarians.

~~~
windows_tips
>I wonder if, faced with this choice, most people would not simply become
vegetarians.

Probably not if they had to forage all their foods at current densities.

~~~
Alex3917
There is plenty of land that could be used for well-managed forest gardens.
Bali is an example of a modern economy where people can forage a lot of their
calories that way.

~~~
windows_tips
It would be real nice if our neighborhoods and streets were lined with edible
plants. It seems like it could/would be a lot of work to maintain, but with
the appropriate tools and planning it might be pretty simple. Non-edible (as
far as I know) street trees are already watered by hand (with water trucks)
here and they only seem to be used for decoration and shade.

edit: one issue to be careful of is the plants collecting "pollution"

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deepsun
> According to The Land Report magazine, since 2008 the amount of land owned
> by the 100 largest private landowners has grown from 28 million acres to 40
> million, an area larger than the state of Florida.

Wow, it's almost 50% increase in just 10 years.

~~~
redahs
Inequality in land ownership has been continuously increasing in the United
States since the 1930s. Higher property tax rates on land ownership are needed
to reverse it, as well as the elimination of property tax exemptions which the
owners of non-profits, private forests, golf courses, etc are currently
receiving.

~~~
zip1234
Why is it a problem that those people are buying more land? If anything, a
single owner that doesn't need the land for economic purposes can protect it
much better than a bunch of individual people. My point is that people assume
automatically that this is bad and must be stopped. Maybe it is good?

~~~
clarkevans
Concentrated ownership is power. Power tends to corrupt.

~~~
grasshopperpurp
Yes, accountability and balance are the main issues. Hoping people will be
good doesn't tend to work out well.

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vfc1
Looking at that map, Between livestock pasture, feed and feed export it
accounts for around 45% of the US. Food that we eat is only a small fraction.

Isn’t this a huge waste of resources, and completely unsustainable?

If we ate the produce directly instead of feeding it to cows and eating them,
how many people could we feed?

What about the gigantic consumption of water this implies?

The link between this to global warming and climate change is undeniable.

~~~
megaman22
You're comparing alfalfa and oranges. You're not going to grow wheat on
pastureland that can support sheep or cattle. Much less other vegetables.

You're also making the assumption that agricultural land is a resource that
needs conservation, when there is a massive surplus of it. We've allowed huge
tracts to revert to forest on the east coast.

~~~
cageface
65% of the grain grown in the US is fed to animals:

[https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-
fuel...](https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-
feed)

Start feeding that directly to people instead and you can use the rest of that
land a lot more efficiently. And that's not even addressing all the other
nasty externalities of breeding that many animals.

~~~
pythonaut_16
More efficiently for what?

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tcbawo
How about a private company (Weyerhaeuser) owning 12.4 million acres of
timberlands. It's about twice the size of Maryland!

~~~
jobu
Growing timber like Weyerhaeuser does should probably be counted as cropland.
They grow mono-culture trees the same way most farmers grow corn, but instead
of harvesting every year it's every couple decades.

The very last line is what bothers me the most:

 _" since 2008 the amount of land owned by the 100 largest private landowners
has grown from 28 million acres to 40 million, an area larger than the state
of Florida."_

That much land-wealth locked up by a handful of individuals seems like yet
another knock against economic mobility. At one time people feared that sort
of wealth concentration could mean a return of the aristocracy and was slowed
somewhat through estate taxes.

~~~
fipple
If Ted Turner is who they’re talking about it’s mainly useless land and he
doesn’t even own the mineral rights.

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bensonn
"With so much of the U.S. population in urban areas, it’s little surprise that
these areas contribute an outsize amount to the economy. The 10 most
productive metropolitan areas alone contributed to about 40 percent of U.S.
GDP in 2016."

I always find facts like this misleading, not purposefully so but misleading
all the same. Take a semi-random example, PepsiCO. HQ in NY, Incorporated in
NC, 250k + employees, 60B+ revenue. This is a huge company with many brands
and global sales. They are stocked and sold all over the world with factories,
distribution centers, sales centers, etc all over the place.

Does the NY metropolitan area claim all 60B in productivity?

Weyerhauser is another interesting company. For 100 years they were based on
of Federal Way and only recently moved to Seattle (probably same metro area
anyway). Obviously their bread and butter, timber, is not grown, harvested or
converted into product in the metro area. The CEO lives in Seattle but the
thousands of lumberjacks and mill workers are not in urban areas. The
employees that "do the work" are not in urban areas. That last sentence isn't
meant to be inflamatory but it was the best wording I could think of.

Some companies, maybe Facebook, do generate the vast majority from the HQ in
an urban area.

It is beyond my skills to figure it out but I think an equally cool
map/graph/infographic (I do think this is cool, just a small nitpick here)
would be to break down how and where companies actually generate their
revenue.

Another possibility- I don't know what I am talking about and these stats
already take this into account.

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austinshea
This really looks like what theoutline.com does now.

I can’t imagine bloomberg.com would be creating this sort of web experience
without whatever Topolsky did while he was there.

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uptown
The portion of the country owned by Weyerhaeuser, shown in the map at the
bottom of the article, is astounding. According to Wikipedia they own or
control nearly 12.4 million acres of timberlands in the U.S. and manage an
additional 14.0 million acres timberlands under long-term licenses in Canada.

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alienreborn
Whoa, America has lot of golf courses!

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torpfactory
That graphic at the end is a great way to explain how much area is used for
our meat eating habit. Think of all the land which is not being used for...
anything else. We are truly ecologically privileged to be able to create such
a huge impact in order to eat meat.

Incredible.

~~~
gweinberg
A lot less impressive when you recognize most grazing land isn't much good for
anything else.

~~~
torpfactory
It is a pretty significant diversion of land from a natural state though.
Cattle grazing, thought it isn’t an ecological disaster like dam building, is
quite different than leaving the land untouched.

Plus, a good portion of the country’s good farmland is diverted to growing
feed for those animals.

Think of it like: how many acres have been changed from a natural ecosystem to
an artificial one for meat eating.

~~~
pathseeker
>Cattle grazing, thought it isn’t an ecological disaster like dam building, is
quite different than leaving the land untouched.

Leaving the land untouched is even more 'ecologically privileged' than using
it to make expensive food.

>Plus, a good portion of the country’s good farmland is diverted to growing
feed for those animals.

Growing feed (hay/grass) is much easier than growing things like almonds. If a
farmer could grow something humans would pay for directly rather than hay,
they would.

~~~
jdietrich
Given the colossal and uneven levels of subsidies in US agriculture, I'd be
reluctant to draw any conclusions about what the market is willing to bear.

~~~
adventured
US agriculture subsidies are not colossal in fact. They're about $20-$25
billion per year. They shouldn't exist at all ideally, however given the
immense size of the US agriculture market, and how critical it is to keeping
hundreds of millions of people alive, it's hardly a concerning sum.

By contrast, EU farm subsidies in a smaller economy are three times that size.
If the US farm subsidies are colossal, I'm not sure what you'd call 3x
colossal.

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vertexFarm
Huh. When you look at the graphics which concentrate all the urbanized land on
the northeast coast, it looks like our total urban area is close to the size
of Mega-City One. Cool.

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almostApatriot1
interesting article but i couldn't get the entire map to fit on my (13 inch)
screen no matter how I adjusted the browser. Very annoying.

~~~
catacombs
You should let the reporters know you can't see the image. I'm sure they would
appreciate the feedback and fix it right away.

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nautilus12
I find the scroll UI for this really annoying. It gets stuck on the bottom of
my screen until the last image.

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mc32
If urban (built-up) areas have quadrupled since the 50's, I don't think that
pace can continue unabated. Population has roughly doubled since then. It
would seem the trend would require denser cities and suburbs, which should not
be too difficult given that most metro areas are relatively low density.

~~~
jdietrich
The United States has a population density of 86 people per square mile. In
Britain it's 704, in the Netherlands it's 1075 and in Singapore it's 20,192.
You've got plenty of room.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density)

~~~
AngryData
While im sure they don't utilize all of their available farm land, it is worth
mentioning that Britain imports almost 30% of their food, which means they are
at or near the limit of sustainably feeding themselves, and even then almost
60% of the world's crop yield is the direct result of fossil fuel derived
fertilizer, which we are going to have to give up soon if we don't all want to
be cooked alive, which will increase the energy costs of fertilizer production
10 fold. The US would be hard pressed to find similar external sources of food
if their population density rose significantly higher. Especially on top of
all the desert and arid grassland areas that are pretty poor for farming.

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partycoder
56 million acres are Indian reservations and should probably be marked as
such.

~~~
ajross
Reservations are a political boundary, this is a map of land use. You'd have a
fair argument that the state boundaries shown on that map should reflect the
reservations too, but not that the color key should include the nature of the
local government.

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influnza
I really enjoyed this page's UI on a mobile device.

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Avalaxy
* Here's How The United States Uses Its Land

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garyclarke27
Excellent well presented interesting analytical article. No surprise (but
still remarkable) that Americans use more land for Golf than growing
vegetables. Tragic though the insane amount of land used to grow biofuel, must
be one of the most idiotic decisions ever made by politicians, cow towing to
the anti (life giving) CO2 cult.

~~~
hiddevb
> Tragic though the insane amount of land used to grow biofuel

Out of curiosity, why do you think it's tragic? Aren't these fuels used for
experimentation with sustainable energy?

