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No, we use it to vote.
It seems a little inefficient to put all the airports together
Its really not so bad once you get over the 12 hour drive.
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
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.
I heard that even though the fire was born here, it has illegal flameborn parents so they’re going to put it on a cargo ship with a bunch of pallets and deport it and that’s how we’ll solve the wildfire issue. Saw it on Joe rogan
Can’t rake everywhere all the time
So, if most people are going vegan, there would be much more space for other stuff, yes?
Golf is way too big, imo. No other sport even makes the list here.
Maybe we can combine it with “wildfires”.
Fuck golf
Yeah that land could be used for more christmas trees
Ban golf and replace all courses with public housing
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.
Man that guy Urban needs so many houses… What does he even do with them all?
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.
I love this visualization and for some reason your comment made me also wish we had this data correlated with the water usage for each land use category.
There’d be a square or two which just say “Nestlé” lol
“Wildfires” is a surprisingly large area. I wonder what the 2025 area for it is.
Get rid of livestock
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.
And people will still say that the meat/dairy industry aren’t a plague
What? There are lots of legitimate complaints about the meat and dairy industries, but almost all that land being used for them is arid, rocky wasteland that has a cow wander over it twice a year. That’s not actually even on the list of problems with those industries.
Ugh, I accidentally deleted my previous comment when trying to edit, sorry for the double reply.
Original reply:
You think that the amount of land being dedicated to making food for livestock dwarfing the amount of land dedicated to feeding people is not a legitimate complaint?
Edit: eyeballing it, we use twice as much land (and as a result, water, energy, etc used in the farming process) making food for livestock (ie, food for what will become food) as we do making food for us
No. No. That’s completely wrong. That’s not what I think, because it doesn’t make any sense. There are no crops that can be effectively and cheaply grown in rocky, arid wasteland. If we weren’t using it to let cattle graze, it would be wild land being grazed by buffalo instead. Now, maybe you could argue that would still be better, but it wouldn’t be growing food for humans any more efficiently. Buffalo aren’t actually any more efficient than cattle at producing meat, and nobody’s hauling water up to into the high Rockies to irrigate rocks. That’s not a real thing that people would be doing if cattle weren’t grazing there.
There is a dedicated section for “pasture/range” which is the grazing space you’re talking about. I am not talking about that. I’m talking about the section for “livestock feed” which is crop growth.
it’s not actually clear how much of that land is exclusively for growing animal feed, and how much of that land is being attributed to animal feed, which is also used for human food. for instance, a soybean is only about 20% oil. about that much is used by humans. The other 80% of the soybean is a byproduct of pressing for oil called soy cake. that soy cake is fed to livestock, but if it weren’t fed to livestock, it would be industrial waste. is 80% of soybean land use to grow food for livestock? no. 100% of it is used to grow food for people, and food for livestock. and we feed cottonseed to cattle, but cotton isn’t grown for cottonseed: it’s grown for textiles. is that land being attributed? I’ve read the article is carefully as I can, and it doesn’t seem to make this nuance at all.
That’s fair. I guess I misunderstood. Sorry. Yeah, it would be nice if that part were smaller. It’s still not a perfect one to one comparison. Feed crops do actually tend to use less other resources. Sometimes a lot less, depending on the crop you’re comparing them to, but yeah, it’s a lot of land that could be growing things for humans, and there’s more of it than there needs to be. Sorry. You are right about that.
All good, glad we smoothed that over :)
You think that the amount of land being dedicated to making food for livestock dwarfing the amount of land dedicated to feeding people is not a legitimate complaint?
