GUYANA Government WILL BE WISE TO DO A SURVEY in GUYANA, to track CROPLAND being ABANDONED, as Guyana is with many similarities to California, Florida and Texas, USA.
Tens of millions of acres of cropland lie abandoned, study shows (WASHINGTON POST): Erin Blakemore is a freelance reporter based in Boulder, Colo., and a frequent contributor to The Washington Post.
About 30 million acres of U.S. cropland have been abandoned since the 1980s, a new analysis suggests. The study, published in Environmental Research Letters, offers a detailed look at land with immense environmental and economic potential — land that, researchers write, was abandoned at a rate of over a million acres a year between 1986 and 2018.
The analysis used satellite data and cropland information from the U.S. Agriculture Department to map the locations of abandoned cropland and how long it had been out of use. The researchers conclude that during the study period about 12.3 million hectares — or 30.39 million acres — of cropland went unused in the contiguous United States.
The biggest changes took place around the Ogallala Aquifer, whose groundwater irrigates parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming, and which has been drying out because of excessive pumping and droughts. Other abandonment hot spots were located around Mississippi, the Atlantic Coast, North Dakota, northern Montana, and eastern Washington state.
The fate of the former cropland varied. About half (53 percent) changed to grassland and pasture, while 18.6 percent became shrub land and forest. Other abandoned cropland became wetlands (8.4 percent) and non-vegetated lands (4.6 percent), while some of the rest was recultivated or could not be classified. The land was abandoned at an average of 0.51 million hectares — 1.26 million acres — a year.
The study did not focus on the reasons farmers stopped using the cropland. But the researchers reported that less than 20 percent of the abandoned land was enrolled in the USDA Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to take out of agricultural production environmentally sensitive land that is at risk of soil erosion, habitat loss or reductions in water quality.
Those surprised researchers. “A lot of the assumptions were that this former cropland had a lot of overlap with formal conservation programs,” Tyler Lark, an assistant scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment who co-authored the study, said in a news release. “But we saw that they’re almost entirely distinct pools.”
Understanding where abandoned cropland lies will allow researchers to analyze how such lands might be better used, the researchers say. “The cropland abandonment we identify here is expected to persist,” they write.
The countries in the WESTERN HEMISPHERE are Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Barbados, Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, GUYANA, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, USA, and Venezuela.
With the Renewed Assurances of my Highest Consideration.
Dr. Shamir Andrew Ally, PhD., MBA, FAIA (UK), DTM.
NORTH CAROLINA, USA
Mobile/WhatsApp 1.484.347.0422
- Guyana’s SECOND Ambassador to KUWAIT 2016-2020
- FIRST Alternate GOVERNOR, Islamic Development Bank, SAUDI ARABIA, 2017-2020
- Deputy Chairman, Board of Directors, GO-Invest, The Guyana Office for Investment, February 2016 to December 2019.
