Farming Claims Almost Half Earth's Land, New Maps Show

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Farming Claims Almost Half Earth's Land, New Maps Show

Food production takes up almost half of the planet's land surface and threatens to consume the fertile land that still remains, scientists warn.

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.

University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists compiled the maps using satellite images and crop and livestock production data from countries around the world. The team presented their picture of global land use this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

"The satellite data tells us where cultivation is occurring with good spatial accuracy, while the census data is able to tell us what is being grown there," said Navin Ramankutty, a land-use researcher with Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE).

The maps suggest that an area roughly the size of South America is used for crop production, while even more land—7.9 to 8.9 billion acres (3.2 to 3.6 billion hectares)—is being used to raise livestock.

And with the world's population growing rapidly, the pressure is on farmers to find new land to cultivate, the study team says...

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This is a great article... Scary too...

BTW, SAGE has a great Atlas of the Bisosphere. It doesn't look like it includes their most recent data mentioned in the above article, but I'd expect an update soon. Very cool.






[edit on 10-12-2005 by loam]

Even more reason to radically change our farming methods.

www.wired.com...