Cropland expansion outpaces agricultural and biofuel policies in the United States

By Tyler J. Lark, J. Meghan Salmon, Holly K. Gibbs. 2015

465 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cultivation of corn and soybeans in the United States reached record high levels following the biofuels boom of the late 2000s. Debate exists about whether the expansion of these crops caused conversion of grasslands and other carbon-rich ecosystems to cropland or instead replaced other crops on existing agricultural land. We tracked crop-specific expansion pathways across the conterminous US and identified the types, amount, and locations of all land converted to and from cropland, 2008–2012. We found that crop expansion resulted in substantial transformation of the landscape, including conversion of long-term unimproved grasslands and land that had not been previously used for agriculture (cropland or pasture) dating back to at least the early 1970s. Corn was the most common crop planted directly on new land, as well as the largest indirect contributor to change through its displacement of other crops. Cropland expansion occurred most rapidly on land that is less suitable for cultivation, raising concerns about adverse environmental and economic costs of conversion. Our results reveal opportunities to increase the efficacy of current federal policy conservation measures by modifying coverage of the 2014 US Farm Bill Sodsaver provision and improving enforcement of the US Renewable Fuels Standard.

Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/803907c54d25c61747cebb346005b284681b20d7

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Citations in the corpus

Milkweed restoration in the Midwest for monarch butterfly recovery: estimates of milkweeds lost, milkweeds remaining and milkweeds that must be added to increase the monarch population (2017, methodology): “A total of 55% of cropland expansion comes from CRP land (Lark et al., 2015) and is therefore already accounted for by CRP hectares present in 2014.”
Thinking Like a Grassland: Challenges and Opportunities for Biodiversity Conservation in the Great Plains of North America (2019, background): “…refined and improved, such that caution is recommended in using early years of CDLs for any analysis of land Please cite this article as: Augustine, D et al., Thinking Like a Grassland: Ch Plains of North America, Rangeland Ecology & Management, https://doi.o cover change (Lark et al. 2015, 2017).”
The Global Food‐Energy‐Water Nexus (2018, background): “The boom in biofuel demand in the United States during the late 2000s resulted in substantial increases in maize production for ethanol, which was linked to the expansion of crop production nationally, particularly on more marginal lands, including grasslands and wetlands (Lark et al., 2015).”
Intermediate wheatgrass grain and forage yield responses to nitrogen fertilization (2017, background): “For example, hay land area declined by 11% from 2002 to 2012, despite a net expansion of total cropland during that time (USDA, 2015; Lark et al., 2015).”
The occupation of cropland by global urban expansion from 1992 to 2016 and its implications (2020, background): “…large amount of cropland during 1992–2016, this amount can be offset by global cropland expansion driven by increases in agricultural product prices and croplands replacing pastures and forests, especially in Latin America and North America (Morton et al 2006, Graesser et al 2015, Lark et al 2015).”