Millions of acres of America’s agricultural land were developed or converted to uses that threaten farming between 2001 and 2016, according to “Farms Under Threat: The State of the States,” a new report by American Farmland Trust. The report’s Agricultural Land Protection Scorecard is the first-ever state-by-state analysis of policies that respond to the development threats to farmland and ranchland, showing that every state can, and must, do more to protect their irreplaceable agricultural resources…
The report found that Texas was the most threatened state in the nation due to the loss of agricultural land to poorly planned real estate development. Between 2001 and 2016, 1,373,000 acres of agricultural land were developed or compromised, 555,000 of which were “Nationally Significant,” or land best suited for growing food and crops.
Read more from American Farmland Trust here.