Whose Farm or Ranch?

The seriousness of the development threat to farms and ranches.

Not yours, not your neighbor's; the rural solution does not mean taking up land owned by individual farmers and ranchers, or destroying family farms.

Consider the facts using the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) latest land-use accounting (access via the links below): land formally included in farms and ranches totals 880 million acres, a 39% share of U.S. land; that percentage is of the 51% — 1.15 billion acres — of land formally included in agricultural use, which includes cropland, pasture, rangeland, grazed forest and farm infrastructure. USDA's formal measure of cropland specifically represents a 17% share of U.S. land, totaling 377 million acres.

Roughly half of America’s nonurban land is used for agriculture, and half is not. Only about one-sixth is cropland. The United States contains approximately 2.26 billion acres, of which only about 66 million acres—3%—are classified as urban. Excluding that urban land, approximately 53% of the remaining land is in agricultural use and 47% is nonagricultural rural land. These numbers and the associated data can be found here and here.

Farmed and our allies advocate for the use of rural land to build power and data infrastructure, excluding forests, deserts, wetlands, mountains, parks, wildlife areas, military land, and other protected or inaccessible property.