Man that guy Urban needs so many houses... What does he even do with them all?
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
326 points (98.2% liked)
Data Is Beautiful
7292 readers
504 users here now
A place to share and discuss data visualizations. #dataviz
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
Defense is a surprisingly large use of land. How is that? Can anyone explain the most land intensive uses of the Armed Forces? Like tank training areas maybe?
Mikitary bases are pretty big. Air force, army, national guard, naval air stations, naval bases, there is a lot going on there.
Can't forget that military bases are communities where people live, too. Not just barracks and mess halls for individuals, but there are full neighborhoods and shopping centers for families.*
*My knowledge on this is limited, I just remember visiting a family member on base when I was younger.
Fuck golf
Yeah that land could be used for more christmas trees
Get rid of livestock
So nice of the 100 largest land owning families to have the same amount of land as the entire urban or rural housing population of the rest of the country. I assume it's to fatten themselves up for the rest of us just like the cows.
When do we get to eat them again?
Shit I'm hungry now I'll start the smoker
Gotta see one of these with parking.
It would be a subset of "urban commercial", right? Somewhere in the range of half to three-quarters of it?
Depends how these are defined. Public parking or on-street parking are likely in a different category, not to mention people's driveways.
Food we eat is sepperate from cow pastures...
Nice!
Why do they keep allocating land to wildfires if they're so destructive? /s
That's the federal wildfire sanctuary established by president William McKinney. While most fire has been domesticated, the remaining feral fire is allowed to burn free in Utah.
I heard that even though the fire was born here, it has illegal flameborn parents so they’re going to put it on a cargo ship with a bunch of pallets and deport it and that’s how we’ll solve the wildfire issue. Saw it on Joe rogan
load more comments
(1 replies)
It seems a little inefficient to put all the airports together
Its really not so bad once you get over the 12 hour drive.
hugging the west coast, there are tons of cow farms, and a small part of cali is for the military, SEAL training.
Can we put the 100 largest landowning families in Florida, then saw it off from the rest of the country?
no need to saw, when invasive species and the ocean is taking over. because florida loves to import all the illegal exotic animals, they got plenty reptiles, giant snails, giant rats. the latter 2 both carry nasty parasites.
Shit, there are landlords in the snails?
Golf is way too big, imo. No other sport even makes the list here.
Maybe we can combine it with "wildfires".
I have certainly heard of Weyerhauser, but had no idea they were that big. They're the only 'individual' owner shown. The land-owning families is odd as I'm sure it overlaps a lot with pasture and private timberland.
is Alaska included? or are we just ignored because of our small population?
Probably ignored as that would skew the data making think that the US is still one big wilderness.
Remember, not all land is the same. Some is too dry to grow human food. Some too wet. There are also other things that land is either too or not enough.
Too cold or not enough warm.
I bet we could still multiply output by a decent number by replacing meat production with directly edible crops, if there was a need for it
It us wild that there is not a need. Distribution is (or was) the issue. Very sad humans refuse to feed others.
It's quite interesting that "rural highways" is one of the categories identified, but not any other sort of improved road. The data source has a base granularity where one square is 250,000 acres (~100,000 hectares), and then additional state data is factored in for increased precision. It supposingly being USDA data, they might primarily care only about those highways used to connect farms to the national markets.
That said, I would be keenly interested in the land used for low-volume, residential streets that support suburban and rural sprawl, in comparison to streets in urban areas. Unlike highways which provides fast connectivity, and unlike dense urban-core streets that produce value by hosting local businesses and serving local residents, suburban streets take up space, intentional break connectivity (ie cul de sacs), and ultimately return very little in value to anyone except to the adjacent homeowners, essentially as extensions of their privately-owned driveways.
It may very well be in USDA's interest to collect data on suburban sprawl, as much of the land taken for such developments was perfectly good, arable land.
load more comments
(2 replies)
And people will still say that the meat/dairy industry aren't a plague
What? There are lots of legitimate complaints about the meat and dairy industries, but almost all that land being used for them is arid, rocky wasteland that has a cow wander over it twice a year. That's not actually even on the list of problems with those industries.
Ugh, I accidentally deleted my previous comment when trying to edit, sorry for the double reply.
Original reply:
You think that the amount of land being dedicated to making food for livestock dwarfing the amount of land dedicated to feeding people is not a legitimate complaint?
Edit: eyeballing it, we use twice as much land (and as a result, water, energy, etc used in the farming process) making food for livestock (ie, food for what will become food) as we do making food for us
No. No. That's completely wrong. That's not what I think, because it doesn't make any sense. There are no crops that can be effectively and cheaply grown in rocky, arid wasteland. If we weren't using it to let cattle graze, it would be wild land being grazed by buffalo instead. Now, maybe you could argue that would still be better, but it wouldn't be growing food for humans any more efficiently. Buffalo aren't actually any more efficient than cattle at producing meat, and nobody's hauling water up to into the high Rockies to irrigate rocks. That's not a real thing that people would be doing if cattle weren't grazing there.
There is a dedicated section for "pasture/range" which is the grazing space you're talking about. I am not talking about that. I'm talking about the section for "livestock feed" which is crop growth.
That's fair. I guess I misunderstood. Sorry. Yeah, it would be nice if that part were smaller. It's still not a perfect one to one comparison. Feed crops do actually tend to use less other resources. Sometimes a lot less, depending on the crop you're comparing them to, but yeah, it's a lot of land that could be growing things for humans, and there's more of it than there needs to be. Sorry. You are right about that.
All good, glad we smoothed that over :)
You think that the amount of land being dedicated to making food for livestock dwarfing the amount of land dedicated to feeding people is not a legitimate complaint?
I would love to flip the railroad usage and cow pasture usage.
Also, mfs drinking too much corn syrup.
theresa tiny part thats for maple syrup
beautiful
view more: next ›