Imagine if all the farmland in Iowa were to just disappear. Would you notice? What if it happened over the course of 20 years? Would you still notice?
The American Farmland Trust issued a report on Wednesday which shows between 1992 and 2012, an estimated 31 million acres of farmland were lost. The amount is equal to all the farmable land in Iowa. What is truly unsettling is 11 million of those acres were some of the best farming land in the nation.
The report titled, ?Farms Under Threat: The State of America?s Farmland?, shows just how much farmland has disappeared and why. The biggest culprit was development from urban expansion. The report shows that 59 percent of all urban development has been happening on farmland. Once this farmland is developed, it cannot be retrieved.
It seems to be ironic that the expansion of the population is encroaching on the very resource needed to feed a growing population. A population that is growing more critical of farming practices and who doesn?t understand why farmers are employing methods to produce more with less. If ever there was a time to ?agvocate? it is now. Because right now the loss of farmland is equal to the size of Iowa. In a few years it could be South Dakota. A few years after that it could be equal to the size of Minnesota. We don?t want to wait until the loss of farm land equals the size of California, Texas or Alaska.
