Rising Farm Productivity Restores Cropland to Forest
A new report belies the view that the United States has to a large extent felled its forests for farmland and paved them over for towns and cities. The surprising fact is that forests today cover about 72 percent of the area that was forested way back in 1630 — 10 years after the landing of the Mayflower. That is because farm productivity has improved to the extent that American farmers can now produce far more food on far less land, allowing land previously used for crops to return to forest, according to a report from Ronald Bailey, a science correspondent for Reason magazine. From about 1850 until 1910, the demand for wood as fuel led to the rapid clearing of American forests. But in the 20th century the extent of U.S. forests stabilized, and it began increasing in the second half of the century. This was spurred by revolutions in farming, including the advances made by plant breeder and 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug and his colleagues, who created new high-yield varieties of rice and wheat. U.S. corn production grew 17-fold between 1860 and 2010, yet more land was planted in corn in 1925 than in 2010. American farmers currently average about 180 bushels of corn per acre, more than twice the world average of 82 bushels. But farmers in other countries have been making great strides as well. In 1960, India’s population stood at 450 million, and Indians farmed 161 million hectares (400 million acres). By 2010, India’s population had risen by more than two and a half times, but the amounted of land devoted to crops rose only about 5 percent, according to Bailey, who cites findings from the Population and Development Review. Farmers around the world can now produce about three times as much food as they did in 1960 on the same amount of land. Bailey points to the estimate that if global crop yields had remained at their 1960 levels, farmers would have needed about 3 billion more hectares to plant crops — an area equal to almost twice the size of South America. © Newsmax. All rights reserved. To subscribe or visit go to: http://www.newsmax.com |