Re: The Destruction of Farms by Encroaching Cities.

On 5/10/2024 12:26 PM, Tom Kunich wrote:

Since I've never been further east than San Antonio, Texas, I don't know how they combine living and farming in the eastern half of the US.
 In California it is bandled attrociously with all of the land including farm land gobbled up by developers, and government zoning farms out of business. In Oregon and Washington the matter isn't yet serious because the populations aren't large enough. But Idsho and Montana are faced with the problem of cities beginning their inevitable growth and some way to limit city grown an lean more to the village model of Europe.
 While California was still reasonably small riding from town to town was certainly better than being in traffic with nearly every ride. Niles used to be a village but now there is ONE field left between Oakland and Niles. It is small but the farmer still grows corn each year. Otherwise it is house to house except ehere industrial buildings are placed.
 This destruction of the enviroinment by the Democrats shows that idiots have no foresight

In 1930 there were 986,771,016 farm acres total in USA, 51.8% of the entire area.
https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1930/agriculture-volume-2/03337983v2p1ch02.pdf
For 2023 it was merely 878,600,000 acres, something around 46.2% so you're right about the trend (-5.5% over 90 years).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/196104/total-area-of-land-in-farms-in-the-us-since-2000/
That said, production per acre is exponentially higher (with less labor) as noted here often, due to hybridization, better technical soil analyses/rectification, better water management, mechanization rather than draft animals and so on.  A crisis doesn't seem likely.
'Destruction of environment' is a subjective area. I would ask 'sez who?'. One man decries home building while another eschews solar farms and yet another bemoans 'wildlife areas' with zero output/revenue per acre.
--
Andrew Muzi
am@yellowjersey.org
Open every day since 1 April, 1971