Because It’s Cool

Perhaps lost in the long Labor Day weekend, Friday Bloomberg published a map-based presentation on land usage in the United States. It is totally cool and worth a look. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) categorizes land area into six types (in descending order of usage): pasture (654 million acres), forest (539 million acres), cropland (392 million acres), “special use” (169 million acres), urban (69.4 million acres) and miscellaneous (68.9 million acres). The latter are areas of “low economic value” — marshes, deserts, cemeteries, and (this hurts) golf courses. The land usage interacts with the U.S. system of governance to influence the policy process. For example, urban areas are economically vital. As Bloomberg puts it: "Even though urban areas make up just 3.6 percent of the total size of the 48 contiguous states, four in five Americans live, work and play there. With so much of the U.S. population in urban areas, it’s little surprise that these areas contribute an outsize amount to the economy. The 10 most productive metropolitan areas alone contributed to about 40 percent of U.S. GDP in 2016.” Contrary to any other opinion you may have heard, the United States is also becoming more urbanized every year. The land usage helps explain the battle over infrastructure spending and funding. The bulk of the key infrastructure is in those urban areas, but since every state gets two U.S. Senators, the votes needed to fund it lie outside those areas. Cropland is about 20 percent of the country. "Yet the actual land area used to grow the food Americans eat is much smaller—only about the size of Indiana, Illinois and half of Iowa combined. More than a third of the entire corn crop is devoted to ethanol production.” Those concentrations of rural economic power — especially ethanol — explain why seemingly wrong-headed agriculture and energy subsidies are so hard to root out of the federal budget. Also, in the era of Trump tariffs, it is useful to remember that trade is central to the agriculture economy. Per Bloomberg, "While the U.S. benefits from an overall agricultural trade surplus, Americans imported 15 percent of their food and beverage products in 2016. More than 30 percent of the fresh fruits and vegetables Americans consume come from other countries, predominantly Mexico and Canada. The amount of U.S. land used to produce citrus fruits alone is larger than Rhode Island.” The final takeaway is that the land for pastures and cropland used to produce feed amounts to 41 percent of U.S. land in the contiguous states. There’s a single, major occupant on all this land: cows. If cows could vote, God knows what policy would look like!