The world has passed ‘peak agricultural land’
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
What people need to remember is farmland is not just dirt. Dirt is near worthless. But top soil is an entire living ecosystem of bacteria and fungus that must be grown and takes a very long time to do so. And an organism/ecosystem has an upper limit on how fast it can grow no matter how much food and care you put into it. The topsoil on a field by itself is worth more than all the equipment, buildings, seeds, fertilizer and more combined.
Because of agricultural land contraction large agricultural businesses have been enabled to deplete the soil for short-term 10-20 year profits, sell it off for development, then buy out the smaller and more sustainable run farms that are on the edge of bankruptcy because of the unsustainable practices they cannot compete with. At some point we will run out of old farmland to keep buying up and unsustainable practices will become impossible, but not before we ruin tons of prime farmland that took 100+ years to build up and further limiting the amount and yield of sustainable agricultural practices until we spend many more decades building the soil back up.
Its like the same problem with fishing, we can gather more fish now and make greater profits now, but at the cost of severely reduced future output as we over-utilize natural processes.
With all the organic food demand they probably have to do something like this to ensure the health of the land. Next time I pick up some organic produce at $day_job I’ll have to interrogate them on how they manage their land.
It also sometimes happens that an article makes it into the pool before a different version of the same story gets posted or gets traction.
And sometimes (but rarely, I think/hope!) different mods put the different versions of the same story into the pool.