this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Data Is Beautiful

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 54 minutes ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

Food we eat is sepperate from cow pastures...

Nice!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago

Yeah that land could be used for more christmas trees

[–] [email protected] 0 points 57 minutes ago

Get rid of livestock

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago

Shit I'm hungry now I'll start the smoker

[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Gotta see one of these with parking.

[–] vithigar 7 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

It would be a subset of "urban commercial", right? Somewhere in the range of half to three-quarters of it?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Depends how these are defined. Public parking or on-street parking are likely in a different category, not to mention people's driveways.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Can we put the 100 largest landowning families in Florida, then saw it off from the rest of the country?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 49 minutes ago

Shit, there are landlords in the snails?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 47 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

Why do they keep allocating land to wildfires if they're so destructive? /s

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago

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

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[–] SplashJackson 7 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Where's the amounts used strictly for cars?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

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.

[–] Greg 68 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

It seems a little inefficient to put all the airports together

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

Its really not so bad once you get over the 12 hour drive.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 46 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Golf is way too big, imo. No other sport even makes the list here.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 13 hours ago

Maybe we can combine it with "wildfires".

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

I would love to flip the railroad usage and cow pasture usage.

Also, mfs drinking too much corn syrup.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

theresa tiny part thats for maple syrup

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago

It us wild that there is not a need. Distribution is (or was) the issue. Very sad humans refuse to feed others.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

And people will still say that the meat/dairy industry aren't a plague

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 45 minutes ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 50 minutes ago* (last edited 48 minutes ago)

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?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 hours ago

There'd be a square or two which just say "Nestlé" lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

This makes my eyes bleed

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 hours ago

Very interesting! Now do one for EU, please.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 14 hours ago

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

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