yellowcanoe wrote:Tanada wrote: In addition to that reality a great deal of fully viable crop land in North America has been allowed to return to fallow/wild status in the last half century of megafarm style agriculture. Half the farms from Maine to Minnesota have been allowed to go back to woodlot since 1972 when Federal policy was changed to encourage mega corporate farms vs family operations. All of that land is still there and still viable farmland and if people need to grow more food it will be put back into production.
Maybe things are different in the US, but here in Ontario farm land has reverted back to forest primarily where the soil was too thin and nutrient poor to sustain farming.
In the USA east of the Mississippi it has been mostly small farms going out of business because they can not compete economically with corporate farms that use the same equipment over ten thousand acres that a 320 acre farm would need amortizing the costs and using hired labor vs family labor in many cases. Those farms that remain in my area are mostly cases of where the most successful small farmer in an area has bought up neighboring farmland as smaller farms went into bankruptcy so that they have collectively large parcels of land except it is separated into small parcels interspersed with other farm parcels from other successful farmer who have followed the same practice. Further west in the Great Plains the corporate farms are generally adjoining properties instead of being interspersed so the corporate farm can start harvesting on say the southeast corner of the property and keep going until they reach the north west corner without having to skip over other parcels. Here in Ohio a farmer has a 25 acre lot here and then two interspersed plots then another 50 acre plot and so on scattered over 10 miles of territory but totally up into a thousand acre farm more or less. When we need to put those eastern fallow lands back in service (when it becomes profitable) because earths population is still rapidly growing someone will lumber those fallow lots and put them back into productive use. Depending on circumstances they might even get government assistance through use of eminent domain practices to create consolidated large acreage farms by forcing the remaining small farms to all sell to a corporate large entity to force the farming east of the Mississippi to morph into strong resemblance of the western farm practices.