The Race for Nature: How Congress Can Help Farmers and Ranchers Save Their Lands and Survive the Coronavirus-Induced Economic Crisis

(Center for American Progress) ... Urban sprawl, oil and gas extraction, and other industrial uses consumed more than 45,000 square miles of farms, ranches, and private working forests in a recent two-decade span.² Overall, more than 75 percent of the natural areas lost to development from 2001 to 2017 in the United States were on privately owned lands.³

The coronavirus-induced economic collapse, however, will likely deal a catastrophic blow to families who make their living off their lands.

Economists have already documented a roughly 25 percent increase in farm bankruptcies since 2019, and bankruptcies will likely continue to rise sharply in the months ahead.⁴ Unless policymakers can provide relief where it is needed most, family farmers, ranchers, and private forest owners will be forced to sell off their lands and operations. The economic damage of losing these operations will ripple out to feed supply stores, hardware stores, equipment dealers, and other rural businesses that support working landowners. Meanwhile, as families are forced to sell their working lands, the United States will see even more of its privately owned natural areas subdivided for suburban sprawl, sold off for industrial agriculture, or sacrificed for drilling and mining.

Specifically, the federal government should immediately expand and accelerate the nation’s private land conservation easement programs. READ MORE