America’s Native Grasslands Are Disappearing

by Katharine Gammon (The Guardian) The Great Plains are being torn up at a ferocious rate – with frightening implications for biodiversity and carbon storage. -- ... (Patrick)Lendrum led a research team that released a report in September showing that from 2018 to 2019 an estimated 2.6m acres of grassland were plowed up, primarily to make way for row crop agriculture – an area larger than Yellowstone national park.

For a few years, the rate of grassland loss was decreasing. But then in 2018 and 2019, the number started to increase again, Lendrum says. “That’s an alarming trend.” It’s also a huge blow for efforts to fight the climate crisis and represents a little reported unfolding environmental disaster in the US.

There are a web of reasons why more grasslands are turning into crops. Farmers and ranchers make decisions based on global commodity prices. There’s an increased demand for crops for human food, livestock feed and fuel. Biofuels like ethanol boomed in 2009 or 2010 and that increased demand.

Urban sprawl also plays into it: Lark is researching the ways that croplands are being turned into housing – so the total amount of cropland isn’t expanding that much, but it’s being developed for residential use, and crops are being pushed to the periphery. “It’s almost a cascading effect, as we look at future urban expansion,” he says.

Lark’s research shows grasslands lost in the past years have been considered marginal, less productive land than other places where farmers could grow crops. At the same time, these marginal areas contain some of the highest-quality habitats – nesting sites for breeding birds and habitat for monarch butterflies.

Additionally, people need to eat, and there’s been a long history of moving west and growing crops in the prairies – American history is full of stories of expansion into the middle of the continent to farm food. And that need to generate crops has economic benefits but has to strike a balance with the ecological realities. Lark says the future is really about using the croplands we have already in the most efficient manner, and improving yields. “There is lots of room to expand production without expanding cropland area – it’s just easier to expand area than work on innovation.”

“We’re not going to reclaim even a small percentage of all the grasslands we’ve lost,” he says. But farmers can make cropland as functional as grasslands used to be, by diversifying crop systems, integrating livestock with crops, and finding ways to value ecosystem services like pollinators and migratory birds. “What needs to change is the public will to actually see changes happening – and that’s longer-term.” READ MORE

Potapov, P., Turubanova, S., Hansen, M.C. et al. Global maps of cropland extent and change show accelerated cropland expansion in the twenty-first century. Nat Food (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00429-z

Their finding of a 9% increase in global cropland since 2000 is significantly higher than the UN Food and Agriculture Organization‘s estimate of 2.6% growth in “arable land” over a similar period, they state.

Notably, global cropland has decreased by 10% on a per capita basis amid population growth, the study finds – with South America the only region to reverse this trend. This underscores the need for existing and new farmland to become increasingly productive in order to keep up with global food demand. READ MORE