God I miss living in the west.
Defense is a surprisingly large use of land. How is that? Can anyone explain the most land intensive uses of the Armed Forces? Like tank training areas maybe?
Mikitary bases are pretty big. Air force, army, national guard, naval air stations, naval bases, there is a lot going on there.
Can’t forget that military bases are communities where people live, too. Not just barracks and mess halls for individuals, but there are full neighborhoods and shopping centers for families.*
*My knowledge on this is limited, I just remember visiting a family member on base when I was younger.
This is correct
Can we put the 100 largest landowning families in Florida, then saw it off from the rest of the country?
no need to saw, when invasive species and the ocean is taking over. because florida loves to import all the illegal exotic animals, they got plenty reptiles, giant snails, giant rats. the latter 2 both carry nasty parasites.
Shit, there are landlords in the snails?
Man that guy Urban needs so many houses… What does he even do with them all?
So nice of the 100 largest land owning families to have the same amount of land as the entire urban or rural housing population of the rest of the country. I assume it’s to fatten themselves up for the rest of us just like the cows.
When do we get to eat them again?
Shit I’m hungry now I’ll start the smoker
How nice for the Reed family/Green Diamond to be split into ‘private family owned timberland’ and ‘corporate timberland’.
Yeah Maine is so well known for it’s urban housing
And Nevada for its timberland.
This makes my eyes bleed
Do we not eat any of the cows?
I expect a substantial portion of that cow pasture/range land is dry grasslands and shrub steppe out west. It’s rough terrain and not good for much else. A lot of it doesn’t even have cows on it most of the time.
It simply takes a loooot of food to produce 1kg of beef
Vegans and ecologists have been talking about this exact issue for a while now
literally decades. lots of talk around the conditions that bring new pandemics too.
if its alafalfa, i think alot of farm land are, its usually exported to the Middle east.
is Alaska included? or are we just ignored because of our small population?
Probably ignored as that would skew the data making think that the US is still one big wilderness.
Fuck golf
Ban golf and replace all courses with public housing
Yeah that land could be used for more christmas trees
Get rid of livestock
Food we eat is sepperate from cow pastures…
Nice!
It’s quite interesting that “rural highways” is one of the categories identified, but not any other sort of improved road. The data source has a base granularity where one square is 250,000 acres (~100,000 hectares), and then additional state data is factored in for increased precision. It supposingly being USDA data, they might primarily care only about those highways used to connect farms to the national markets.
That said, I would be keenly interested in the land used for low-volume, residential streets that support suburban and rural sprawl, in comparison to streets in urban areas. Unlike highways which provides fast connectivity, and unlike dense urban-core streets that produce value by hosting local businesses and serving local residents, suburban streets take up space, intentional break connectivity (ie cul de sacs), return very little in value to anyone except to the adjacent homeowners, essentially as extensions of their privately-owned driveways.
It may very well be in USDA’s interest to collect data on suburban sprawl, as much of the land taken for such developments was perfectly good, arable land.
I love this visualization and for some reason your comment made me also wish we had this data correlated with the water usage for each land use category.
There’d be a square or two which just say “Nestlé” lol