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Loss of Farmland

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Submitted By redneck9
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10/8/12
Loss of Farmland

I. Introduction A. According to the American Farmland Trust between 2002 and 2007, 4,080,300 acres of farmland were lost and converted to development. To put that into perspective, that’s an area almost the size of Massachusetts. Currently our farmland loss is at an astonishing 1 acre + a minute. Now you might not think that this affects you, but you are wrong. B. I want you to think about things that you do every day. Well I know that one thing almost everyone does every day is eat. Eating is necessary to live, and about 99% of your food is probably coming from a farmer. According to Nelson at the American Farmland Trust farmland is necessary in society providing essential goods as well as open space, environmental protection that land markets fail to account for. C. We have been using farmland for things other than farming and it needs to stop, urban development is taking over the land which is so vital to our existence. D. Farmland is being lost way too fast. Urban development is one of the biggest reasons for this loss. We need to stop using our farmland for other things. II. Body A. The amount of land that is usable for farming is very small compared to the amount of land on the earth. Coming from the researchers at farmland.org and the American Farmland Trust is this analogy. (ppt) Consider the Earth as an apple. If it was sliced into 4 pieces, 3 of these would represent water. 1 would be the land. If you were to cut this piece in half, your new piece would represent the land that cannot be used for farming living on. This leaves 1/8 of the Earth to live on as well as grow food on. ¾ of the remaining apple has soil to poor to grow food on because of roads and buildings and soils to poor to grow food on. This leaves 1/32 of the apple that has soil that we can grow food on. Take off the skin of this piece. This represents the topsoil that can be used for producing food. This is showing how we need to preserve the little amount of farmland that we have left on the planet. If we continue this loss rate at some point in time we will not produce enough. We currently grow food for ourselves, as well as export our food to many other countries. If we continue to lose farmland we will not be able to feed a large amount of the world that we currently feed. Eventually you and I would not be able to eat because we will have lost so much farmland that we won’t even have enough food being produced to feed our own country. The loss of farmland is a problem but the reason for the loss is my next point. B. One of the leading reasons for the loss of farmland is urban sprawl. (ppt.) Urban sprawl, which is the spread to cities involving the surrounding towns accounts for over half of the farmland that is lost. This needs to stop. All over the country our farmland that is needed for life is being taken away to build these big houses and mansions all next to each other that are not needed. Many of these homes are currently sitting vacant and have or will be for a long time. Why do we continue to use up our precious farmland to build new houses when we have so many that are already sitting empty. Instead fix up the old ones and use them to live in. Or our building just needs to be more planned out and done smarter to use up less land. Freedgood says "What we need is too actually have better cities, more livable cities, tighter-knit communities, more compact development, make more land available for farming so that we can feed more people." This makes complete sense because a lot of our cities did not use the land they had wisely. What you need to do is go to or tell your parents to go to meetings when they are planning new building on farmland that will be lost. You and everyone else need to make sure that we are building wisely and not misusing our farmland. This misuse of farmland needs to stop.

III. Conclusion A. Farmland is being lost at an incredible rate. If we continue to lose this farmland because of urban development at this rate, we will not produce enough food to feed ourselves and we will all die. B. We need farmland to grow our food so we must stop losing farmland because of urban development. C. So think back. Over a period of 5 years we lost over 4 million acres of farmland. This number each year is increasing and we need to make it decrease. D. We can all help stop the loss of farmland by informing people that you know as well as your legislators in the government about why we need to stop the loss of farmland. Be the voice for farmland! Works Cited "Farming on the Edge Report: Resources | American Farmland Trust." Farming on the Edge Report: Resources | American Farmland Trust. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Oct. 2012. . "Vanishing Farmland: How It's Destabilizing America's Food Supply." Politics Daily. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Oct. 2012. .

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