The important caveat, and misleading headline, here is what comes further down in the article: "Global pasture has peaked. Global cropland has not."<p>We still use an increasing amount of cropland to feed the animals that we're moving closer and closer together in industrial farming (that's why pasture land is decreasing).<p>I think many still underestimate the effect on climate change of livestock agriculture. Furthermore, livestock agriculture is one of the leading causes of the collapse of biodiversity - a crisis that will have much more dire consequences than climate change, in my opninion. Also a crisis that almost nobody is aware of presently.
So, reading comments… two things really stand out to me. First, people forget that the USA throws away more food than Africa produces. The planet is not really close to being out of food, stuff is just wasted by the comparatively rich countries. Second, farming is not all or nothing. There are practices that mix plants, offer diverse sections for pollinators, purposeful use of specific plants that keep predators off of cash crops without toxins, and so on. These could be done while fallow grass growing plots are used for grazing and fertilizer production (you know, animal poop).<p>People always want to believe doom and gloom for some reason, but humans are an incredible animal. We have always found solutions and adopted them because in most cases what is right also happens to be what works best.
Shouldn't this url just point to the original publication here:<p><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/peak-agriculture-land" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/peak-agriculture-land</a><p>This seems like blogspam taking advantage of their Creative Commons licencing.
Remember back in the 70s when there was panic over overpopulation? I feel like we'll actually be running out of water before then (thanks climate change) but if that hadn't happened, it would have been running out of food. Once we reach "peak optimal food production", our population will eventually outstrip food reserves. We would have to start culling people or we'd starve.<p>On an unrelated note, the Overpopulation wikipedia page is interesting: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation</a>
No mention of fertilizer usage, which is created using fossil fuels. Of course you need less land if you take the biomass from a million+ years ago and use it as feedstock for you crops today to produce more than the soil ever could naturally. And even that isn't enough looking at the decline in topsoil thickness which takes 75+ years to build up to even make high yields possible.
In Russia that has probably happened 50 years ago or so.<p>In pre-railway times, people had to grow grains everywhere where they lived, including Russian north such as Archangel, and Siberia.<p>Today, the intensified farming mostly happens in a tiny south-western tip of a country. The downside here is that there's no longer an economical reason for rural life style in most of the country. But, forests and grasslands reclaim former fields all right.
Scan down the page to see the graph. It's an "s-curve" growth trend you'd expect in any species, as studied in ecology[1]. The expected peak was also put in the early 2020s by the Club of Rome studies in the 1970s[2]. Now we get to the fun part of seeing whether we level out at this population or go into collapse.<p>[1]<a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/population-ecology/Logistic-population-growth" rel="nofollow">https://www.britannica.com/science/population-ecology/Logist...</a>
[2]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth</a><p>It also happens to be the normalization function used in neural networks to squash the summed inputs from a feed-forward layer. Interesting to think of the connection there.
IMHO, people traditionally migrated to areas with arable land. Then civilization sprang up around that arable land. As more and more people moved in, rather than staying valuable as arable land, it became residential/commercial/industrial land. This pushes agriculture further and further from those initial ideal conditions. This seems inevitable as long as people prefer density.<p>Bootstrap farmers attract other farmers, which creates communities, which attracts non-farmers. That progression inevitably leads to those some of the largest communities becoming not only non-farming, but anti-farming.
There is some debate now in Sweden about how much of a good idea is to use nuclear power. The greens are absolutely convinced it's a bad idea. Their arguments against nuclear make no sense to me. But their arguments pro-renewable make even less sense. Towns in Sweden are opposing wind energy on the (green) basis that it disturbs the local wildlife, and I saw a field of solar power replace a field of wheat the other day, and trust me it looks even worse than a wind turbine.<p>So no matter where one looks, the bottom line seems pretty clear: there are no good compromises that preserve the planet and promote economic development[^1]. Maybe it is time to start talking about the no-compromise solutions? Like colonizing space[^2] and de-industrializing and de-populating Earth? Because if we don't, when global warming gets worse and the majority of people start considering that industrialization is a threat to the environment and their survival, we will just be talking about de-industrialization and forcing everybody to go vegetarian and poor, no choice involved.<p>[^1]: If you think you have all the material wealth you need, cheers! But poverty still affects the quality of life of most people on the planet, and most people would rather have a better life.<p>[^2]: Must people imagine cramped space bases separated from vacuum by a paper-thin wall while working under the whipping of something like Amazon 5.0, but lush, ginormous space habitats with sensible bylaws are also an option.