America’s Shrinking Farmland Threatens Food Security

Solar panel fields have been reclassified as farms.

(Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

Around the world, farmland is being converted to residential and industrial uses as farms consolidate, urban populations strain land resources, and narrow profit margins discourage would-be farmers. This shrinkage of agricultural acreage has been underway in America and Western Europe for a century. Climate change policies under the Biden administration have flushed renewable manufacturing industries with a trillion dollars in taxpayer funds, stimulating land price inflation, rewarding a handful of “stakeholders,” and pummeling local farms. The nation’s future food security is endangered.

Indiana’s Farmland Shrinkage

A study commissioned by the Indiana legislature in 2023 determined the state had lost 345,682 acres of farmland from 2010 to 2022. The detailed analysis states: “The results show that agricultural land was most likely to be lost in areas around the edges of cities and suburban areas.” The legislature notes in its recommendations:

“Consider what is an alarming level of lost farmland acres as it pertains to food security. When should a county, state or the country be concerned? Task the legislature to consider the threshold in which the lost number of acres significantly reduces access to food.”

Addressing the 2022 US Census of Agriculture data showing the nation’s farmland had shrunk by 2% since 2017, and the number of farmers had declined 7%, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack recently expressed this ominous query: “Are we okay with losing that much farmland or is there a better way?”

Finding a ‘Better Way’

There is, of course, a better way, but farmers and local food production are eclipsed in Washington, DC, by corporate lobbyists, animal rights activists, climate cultists, conservationists, and environmentalists. The Biden administration has increased endangered species regulations that compromise farmers, a 30/30/30 plan to preserve 30% of all American land as wild, and a massive spending spree on renewable energy manufacturing that competes for space with prime farmland across the nation for not only factory construction and worker housing but also thousands of acres of solar panel fields where cows once grazed.

Indiana’s investigation reports that overall agricultural productivity for the state increased over the same period, likely attributable to advances in GMO technologies in corn and soy crops. However, 39% of the nation is currently farmland. If social justice ideologues attack cows as destructive to the climate, vegans condemn omnivores as barbarians, factories and swimming pools replace pastures, vast areas are eminently domained into “rewilding,” and solar panel arrays eclipse renewable grass blades, where exactly will the nation’s food be produced?

Perhaps yet more gleaming factories will be constructed on once-productive farmland to grow synthetic meats from calf fetuses in stainless-steel tanks or house billions of roaches, worms, or spiders for processing into bug-burgers. That is the globalist way.

Greenhouse gases and alleged climate change have been leveraged to wage war on farmers and rural Americans for a quick gorging at the government’s pig trough. These same policies would afford nearly limitless power to national or globalist authorities to dominate what humanity eats, drinks, drives, and thinks. The world is told that not only cows and land but also the entire food chain must be taken over to stave off global warming!

The foundation of liberty has always been local food supplies, which are now rapidly consolidated and regulated. As Wendell Berry cautioned, “Small-scale, diverse farms are the best defense against a dangerous concentration of power.”

The power is concentrating, and it aspires to control food. Farmland isn’t just for Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg anymore. As the number of American-owned family farms declines, foreign ownership of US farmland has escalated. A USDA Farm Service Agency Report of foreign land holdings through December 31, 2020, reflected this accelerating trend:

“Foreign persons held an interest in nearly 37.6 million acres of U.S. agricultural land as of December 31, 2020. This is 2.9 percent of all privately held agricultural land and 1.7 percent of all land in the United States … This is an increase of over 2.4 million acres from the December 31, 2019 report.

“Foreign holdings of U.S. agricultural land increased modestly from 2009 through 2015, increasing an average of 0.8 million per year. Since 2015, foreign holdings have increased an average of nearly 2.2 million acres annually, ranging from 0.8 million acres to 3.3 million acres per year.”

Farming Solar Panels in Lieu of Food

Ironically, the Indiana study included solar panel arrays as farmland in its calculations: “Agriculture officials relied on data from the state Department of Local Government Finance [DLGF] and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to create its findings. The report stated that the DLGF includes uses like renewable energy in its counting for farmland.” This is par for the fraudulent renewables course. Democrat donors have raked in billions of dollars building publicly subsidized factories competing with farmland. The Department of Energy boasts:

“Since President Biden took office, across the nation, companies have announced more than 500 planned investments in at least 450 new or expanded clean energy manufacturing facilities totaling over $160 billion in announced private and public sector investments into solar; electric vehicle assembly, components, and chargers; battery; and offshore wind manufacturing.”

Donald Trump was widely mocked for references to “clean coal.” Yet, clean energy manufacturing facilities for solar, EV components, batteries, and wind turbines all generate massive amounts of toxic chemical pollution, including innumerable “forever chemicals.” They all end up in landfills or as ugly scars on the landscape. All these components pollute groundwater and air with carcinogenic chemicals, whether or not they spare the atmosphere CO2. Unlike greenhouse gases, all of these manmade chemicals are patently anthropogenic.

These “climate-saving” factories and the suburban sprawl they seed eat up farmland, sparing the landscape the supposed scourge of grazing cows but intruding ever more between consumers and the soil microbiome that sustains them. Renewable energy factories are about as climate-benefiting as converting fertile agricultural lands from food crops into fields of solar panels manufactured in coal-fired plants in China, then categorizing this as farmland.

Solar panels are not food. Americans sacrifice their farmland at great peril.

(The author with his cow Sindy — she is due to calve soon.)

(Previously published at Liberty Nation.)