Understanding Global Agriculture in 15 Minutes

by By Tom Schenk (Agriculture 2.0) Over the past ten years, scores of articles have been written about the merits of investing in farmland as well as the challenges of producing enough food to feed a population that is growing at the rate of about 80 million per year at the same time arable farmland is diminishing. To put that in perspective, that is like producing the population of Germany – annually! Worldmapper.org has done an excellent job of producing world maps that show the relative size of each country in relation to various data sets they are analyzing. The following five maps will be helpful in illustrating the challenges of feeding the world.

Africa, the Middle East, SE Asia and China cannot feed themselves. Depending on which side of the fence you are on, it is now becoming easier to see the challenge – or the opportunity – for US agriculture. To understand the limiting factors in keeping the world fed, there’s no better place to begin than the soils. Since about 6000 BC when tribes began to congregate along the Nile, man has been able to transition from being a hunter/gatherer to creating stationary communities that could produce more food than they needed and thus was the beginning of trade. And it was also often one of the core causes of war throughout the history of civilization.

Not all soils are created equal, and good soils are certainly not always found where they are most needed.

What these maps show is that the US has the single largest contiguous mass of the best soils in the world. Though it accounts for only 6.7% of the world land mass, it contains 21% of the worlds Mollisols and 10% of the Alfisols. The icing on the cake is that within these productive soil areas is a network of navigable waterways and ocean ports.

The Ukraine has great soils, but poor transportation infrastructure. Canada has good soils, but also a shorter growing season and long transportation distances. Brazil is blessed with an abundance of productive soils, but a coastal mountain range creates logistical nightmares of transporting grain from the interior via bumper-to-bumper trucks that clog the roads at harvest time. READ MORE