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million acres of prime farmland, with the richest, flattest soils that produce the best yields at the lowest cost. But prime farmland is also attractive for other uses.
Each day, four square miles of America’s best farmland are covered over—by housing tracts, highways, airports, businesses, parking lots or man-made lakes, the NALS says. Put together, a year’s loss could form a corridor from New York to California half a mile wide.
“I think the important thing Americans should be learning is that our good farmland in this country has a limit,” said Robert Gray, who directed the NALS project and now is with the American Farmland Trust. “We have 540 million acres of pretty good farmland out of a land base of 2.2 billion acres, and that 540 million acres is our ace in the hole.”
Worldwide Impact
The study recommends that the country add to the 413 million acres now in cropland, and it has identified 127 million acres of good potential cropland now mainly in forest, pasture, or rangeland.
In fact, the NALS estimates that to keep up with expected world food demand by the year 2000, U. S. farmers may have to cultivate an extra 85 to 140 million acres. Already the yield of one in every three acres harvested is shipped overseas, giving agricultural exports—some $40 billion worth in 1980—a big role in the national balance of trade.
In the meantime, the land losses continue. The NALS says that if farmland conversion continues at the 196777 rate, Florida—producer of half the world’s grapefruit and one-fourth the world’s oranges—will lose nearly all its important farmland by the end of the century. Another Sun Belt state, California, would lose 15 percent of its agricultural lands. Noting that citrus fruit, like many crops, depends on special micro-climates. Gray said, “If you lose those places you’re not going to grow oranges in Kansas.”
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