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How America Uses Its Land

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Re: How America Uses Its Land

#161

Post by 24gttghh »

Shivetya wrote: post #126
rayiner wrote: post #48

The one third being used for cows is misleading. Pasture is basically the Bureau of Land Management’s default use for the vast swaths of federal land. It’s like “here is this land, you’re allowed to graze on it with a permit.” That doesn’t produce that many cows—it’s more about politics and the fact that much of the land is good for little else besides growing grass. The real land use from growing meat comes from the…

I think a better map would be to show how much land is in private hands versus held by Federal and State governments. I bet people would be shocked, see this article from 2016 [1] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/federal...

I bet with more data they would be underwhelmed. Compare the Federal Lands map[0] with a land-cover map[1].

See how much of that BLM managed property is semi-desert? And how much is actually Forest Service land? The first map also includes state lands, which is more apparent in the East, and Alaska. I for one am proud of our reserving of lands for the greater public. It's all of our lands, not just a few greedy landowners.

[0]https://prd-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium...

(above found here: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/pad-us-land-management-map)

[1]https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/pad-us-land-management-map

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#162

Post by Torwald »

hueving wrote: post #99
jaggederest wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the Oregon high desert is really good at being high desert. Does the Mojave have to be useful to humans to be a valuable thing?

>Does the Mojave have to be useful to humans to be a valuable thing? Yes, humans are the only creatures we know of with the concept of valuing land.

Thank you for this comment. This is one of the things I like on HN, people think profoundly.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#163

Post by cageface »

megaman22 wrote: post #139
vfc1 wrote: post #134

Looking at that map, Between livestock pasture, feed and feed export it accounts for around 45% of the US. Food that we eat is only a small fraction. Isn’t this a huge waste of resources, and completely unsustainable? If we ate the produce directly instead of feeding it to cows and eating them, how many people could we feed? What about the gigantic consumption of water this implies? The link between this to global wa…

You're comparing alfalfa and oranges. You're not going to grow wheat on pastureland that can support sheep or cattle. Much less other vegetables. You're also making the assumption that agricultural land is a resource that needs conservation, when there is a massive surplus of it. We've allowed huge tracts to revert to forest on the east coast.

65% of the grain grown in the US is fed to animals:

https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...

Start feeding that directly to people instead and you can use the rest of that land a lot more efficiently. And that's not even addressing all the other nasty externalities of breeding that many animals.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#164

Post by pythonaut_16 »

jaggederest wrote: post #91
davidw wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but some of it... it's really just like this: https://goo.gl/maps/rQjoQWY9Svu It doesn't support many cattle, but that's about all you can do with it, and there are better places for 'outdoor activities'. Cattle do need to be managed so as to allow the native species (sage grouse for instance) to thrive.

I'm pretty sure the Oregon high desert is really good at being high desert. Does the Mojave have to be useful to humans to be a valuable thing?

I feel like you're being a little disingenuous to the OP. He's obviously talking about the economic/productivity value of the land, which is to say that the BLM considers large parts of the country to have little economic value beyond growing grass and thus designates it as free range grazing land.

It doesn't mean it has no value as a wild, natural environment, just that from an economic development perspective there's not a lot going on there.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#165

Post by CalRobert »

huntie wrote: post #132
CalRobert wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There appears to be at least one counterexample, if you count "supporting one's family" as commercially meaningful. Currently reading The Market Gardener and it's surprisingly fascinating for a guide to intensively cultivating on about 1.5 acres - about 140k CAD gross, 60k revenue on 1.5 acres - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18406251-the-market-gard... (the author) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Martin_Fort…

Thanks for the recommendation, I'm going to check it out.

I ended up reading most of it in one sitting; surprisingly engaging.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#166

Post by empath75 »

perfmode wrote: post #105
hueving wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Does the Mojave have to be useful to humans to be a valuable thing? Yes, humans are the only creatures we know of with the concept of valuing land.

huh? do other creatures not inhabit space? does a creature need to have a concept of value in order to value things?

He’s clearly taking about economic value.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#167

Post by clarkevans »

zip1234 wrote: post #159
redahs wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inequality in land ownership has been continuously increasing in the United States since the 1930s. Higher property tax rates on land ownership are needed to reverse it, as well as the elimination of property tax exemptions which the owners of non-profits, private forests, golf courses, etc are currently receiving.

Why is it a problem that those people are buying more land? If anything, a single owner that doesn't need the land for economic purposes can protect it much better than a bunch of individual people. My point is that people assume automatically that this is bad and must be stopped. Maybe it is good?

Concentrated ownership is power. Power tends to corrupt.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#168

Post by pythonaut_16 »

cageface wrote: post #163
megaman22 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing alfalfa and oranges. You're not going to grow wheat on pastureland that can support sheep or cattle. Much less other vegetables. You're also making the assumption that agricultural land is a resource that needs conservation, when there is a massive surplus of it. We've allowed huge tracts to revert to forest on the east coast.

65% of the grain grown in the US is fed to animals: https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel... Start feeding that directly to people instead and you can use the rest of that land a lot more efficiently. And that's not even addressing all the other nasty externalities of breeding that many animals.

More efficiently for what?

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#169

Post by strainer »

hirundo wrote: post #30

> More than one-third of U.S. land is used for pasture ... There’s a single, major occupant on all this land: cows. Not here. I live on cow range land, but the cattle are outnumbered by elk. The elk hunting industry here is larger than the cattle industry. Every third local seems to be a hunting guide, and many of those are cow growers too. This seems to me to be a very positive thing that should be encouraged. Inste…

I noticed US has around the same magnitude of cattle as it had wild ranging buffalo a few centuries ago. That doesnt seem like a great conversion.

Those forest reserves are enviable, the UK is lucky if it has a couple of squares left.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#170

Post by GW150914 »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #94
GW150914 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the methanogens in a cow’s gut mean that they’re an environmental disaster. I’ve read about seaweed being used to curb their, um, “output” yet unless thst comes into widespread use the state of affairs is grim. Grazing isn’t beneficial, it’s just a way to turn sequestered carbon into methane-belching cattle. Either we need to rapidly enact means to reduce those emissions with dietary additives, or we ne…

> Unfortunately the methanogens in a cow’s gut mean that they’re an environmental disaster. The bison that lived there before had identical gut bacteria, and it doesn't seem to have caused an "environmental disaster". Why not?

Because the bison were between 3x to 4x less numerous than cattle, lived far longer lives than the average 2.5 years to slaughter of a cow (not counting veal calves which are killed far sooner and never graze). It’s not just the number of cows or bison alive at any moment, but when you consider a 10 year period and count total individuals it’s even more stark due to rapid turnover of cattle. Buffalo were part of an ecosystem, so you had a loop of carbon in soil, carbon in plants, carbon in buffallo, and then a lot of that carbon returning to the soil as bison or wolf corpses.

Modern cattle spend some time grazing in the Great Plains, but start their lives on farms, and finish their lives on feed lots. Then they’re slaughtered, and more CO2 is emitted transporting them all around the country and indeed, world. Then of course, the bison existed in a world before heavy industry, a world of millions rather than billions of people, a world before automobiles, airplanes, coal fired plants, oil exploration, strip mining, rainforest clearing, ocean acidification and overfishing, etc... etc...

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