Quote:
Originally Posted by Obadno
I never suggested it be a goal I simply stated it as a factual reality, the USA could fit many many many more people.
What the USA produces now is not what the USA is capable of producing because there isn't demand. Our farmland is not used to its most efficient purpose at all and much of what could be farmland isnt utilized at all.
|
Is there really that much farmland that isn't utilized? I know there is in the Eastern Great Lakes and parts of the Southeast land that has gone fallow but as far as I understand that wasn't the greatest farmland in the country (hence why it's gone fallow). It could be put back into production but it would still be tied to an increase in food prices.
On the other hand, you also have the high productivity farmland in the southern Ogallala aquifer region around the TX/OK/KS/CO/NM border where basically there's not enough precipitation to sustain much agriculture, and agriculture is taking place only thanks to the unsustainable rapid depletion of the ground water aquifer, a water resource that took thousands of years to fill up, so once it's depleted, basically we're not getting it back.
You also have the Central Valley, Imperial Valley and Southern Florida which are specialty crop regions that are threatened by a mix of urban development, groundwater depletion and salt-water infiltration/contamination due to rising sea levels. The Mississippi "Delta" is also experiencing groundwater depletion, although if push comes to shove I suspect it would be possible to built irrigation projects using the Mississippi River waters or use less water intensive crops (although that could lead to more erosion of the real Mississippi Delta).
Then there's climate change. The impact of heat might not be too bad since it could extend growing seasons, although it would lead to increased evaporation. The main difference between the arid scrub land of West Texas and the fertile Canadian Prairies isn't in precipitation, West Texas might actually get a bit more of that, but in the higher temperatures that lead to more evapotranspiration. So the northern Great Plains would need to experience an increase in precipitation to make up for that, which they might, but future precipitation patterns are much harder to predict than temperature.
There's soil depletion/erosion, which is an issue in the bread-basket of IA/SD/ND/MN/IL.
Perhaps the biggest concern in my opinion though, is the question of mined fertilizer. Fertilizer that comes from recycling of the minerals that are removed from farmland is sustainable, ie using plant waste, animal waste, even human waste. Factory farming of livestock is an issue for that though, you remove all these nutrients from farms across the country by harvesting livestock feed, then send it to these factory farms where it gets released back into the environment as pig/cow shit. But instead of spreading it out across all the farms where it can be taken back up by plants as fertilizer, it gets concentrated into a few small areas where it overloads the local environment and gets washed into the ocean where it's lost forever (and pollutes lakes and rivers along the way to the ocean).
Even if you solve the factory farming problem though, I don't think that complete resolves the world's reliance on industrial/synthetic fertilizer. I think that has been responsible for something like a doubling of agricultural yields worldwide. And most of that comes from potash mined from Saskatchewan, Belarus and Russia, and phosphorus from Morocco/Western Sahara. So not a renewable resource and something that could be depleted in a short enough time-frame that it's definitely relevant to discussions about how things will be when/if the USA reaches a population of 500 million.