Here’s How America Uses Its Land (2018)

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.

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

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

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

Fuck golf
- Ban golf and replace all courses with public housing
- Yeah that land could be used for more christmas trees

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

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

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.

Get rid of livestock

Gotta see one of these with parking.
- It would be a subset of "urban commercial", right? Somewhere in the range of half to three-quarters of it?
  
  Depends how these are defined. Public parking or on-street parking are likely in a different category, not to mention people's driveways.

It seems a little inefficient to put all the airports together
- Its really not so bad once you get over the 12 hour drive.

Why do they keep allocating land to wildfires if they're so destructive? /s
- That's the federal wildfire sanctuary established by president William McKinney. While most fire has been domesticated, the remaining feral fire is allowed to burn free in Utah.
  
  I heard that even though the fire was born here, it has illegal flameborn parents so they’re going to put it on a cargo ship with a bunch of pallets and deport it and that’s how we’ll solve the wildfire issue. Saw it on Joe rogan
- Can't rake everywhere all the time

Golf is way too big, imo. No other sport even makes the list here.
- Maybe we can combine it with "wildfires".

Food we eat is sepperate from cow pastures...
Nice!

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.
  
  Giant rats? I don't believe they exist
  
  Shit, there are landlords in the snails?

Where's the amounts used strictly for cars?
- The black lines used for borders could be that. I'm not saying it is, just that it might be close to the amount used by roads other than rural highways.

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.
- 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

And people will still say that the meat/dairy industry aren't a plague
- What? There are lots of legitimate complaints about the meat and dairy industries, but almost all that land being used for them is arid, rocky wasteland that has a cow wander over it twice a year. That's not actually even on the list of problems with those industries.
  
  Ugh, I accidentally deleted my previous comment when trying to edit, sorry for the double reply.
  Original reply:
  You think that the amount of land being dedicated to making food for livestock dwarfing the amount of land dedicated to feeding people is not a legitimate complaint?
  Edit: eyeballing it, we use twice as much land (and as a result, water, energy, etc used in the farming process) making food for livestock (ie, food for what will become food) as we do making food for us
  
  You think that the amount of land being dedicated to making food for livestock dwarfing the amount of land dedicated to feeding people is not a legitimate complaint?

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.
- They have rights to nearly all the timberland in washington, which covers about half the state. They're unbelievably huge, it's ridiculous.

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.
- Too cold or not enough warm.
- I bet we could still multiply output by a decent number by replacing meat production with directly edible crops, if there was a need for it
  
  Most pasture/grazing land simply isn't suitable for crop farming, which is why we use it for pasture. Be it because of water retention or lacking topsoil or whatever, it's often the case that the only feasible way to produce food from an area is livestock farming.
  
  It us wild that there is not a need. Distribution is (or was) the issue. Very sad humans refuse to feed others.

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

How nice for the Reed family/Green Diamond to be split into 'private family owned timberland' and 'corporate timberland'.

I would love to flip the railroad usage and cow pasture usage.
Also, mfs drinking too much corn syrup.
- beautiful
- theresa tiny part thats for maple syrup

hugging the west coast, there are tons of cow farms, and a small part of cali is for the military, SEAL training.

This graph is confusing because there are state lines drawn underneath, but it’s not saying by state.

Very interesting! Now do one for EU, please.

Can't figure out why the 100 largest landowning families aren't using their land for any of the other reasons. Surely some of them are having it farmed for them too?
- OIL. There's a LOT of land that might be considered cow/grazing but won't really grow anything worth it. See West Texas.
- Swamps don't make good farms, but some people try to farm in FL, it's just inefficient and heavily pollutes or eliminates wetlands

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.