Data Is Beautiful

So, if most people are going vegan, there would be much more space for other stuff, yes?

I think the graphic would be better if some of the data were nested by size and relationship. IOW Agricultural land would have grazing, food production, feed production, etc. in decreasing size nested over an area. Might give greater sense of how much land is used for ag. Same for forestry; Forestry, parks, commercial logging, etc.

Tobacco is still at least 2,000x too big.

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?

Fuck golf

TIL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weyerhaeuser

Man that guy Urban needs so many houses... What does he even do with them all?

It seems a little inefficient to put all the airports together

Why do they keep allocating land to wildfires if they're so destructive? /s

Gotta see one of these with parking.

Golf is way too big, imo. No other sport even makes the list here.

Get rid of livestock

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?

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), and ultimately 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.

Can we put the 100 largest landowning families in Florida, then saw it off from the rest of the country?

I have certainly heard of Weyerhauser, but had no idea they were that big. They're the only 'individual' owner shown. The land-owning families is odd as I'm sure it overlaps a lot with pasture and private timberland.

And people will still say that the meat/dairy industry aren't a plague

"Wildfires" is a surprisingly large area. I wonder what the 2025 area for it is.

Food we eat is sepperate from cow pastures...

Nice!

I would love to flip the railroad usage and cow pasture usage.

Also, mfs drinking too much corn syrup.

Where's the amounts used strictly for cars?

Remember, not all land is the same. Some is too dry to grow human food. Some too wet. There are also other things that land is either too or not enough.