All farmers on the ground know their land as well as their own wrinkled hands, but totaling up all the world's cropland is a difficult task. Yet the competition for land among developers, growers and other parties makes getting an accurate count of the world's arable acres especially important as the planet's population grows.
Two new maps released Friday (Jan. 16) considerably improveestimates of the amount of land farmed in the world — one map reveals the world's agricultural lands to a resolution of 1 kilometer, and the other provides the first look at the sizes of the fields being used for agriculture, the researchers said. Earlier studies estimated that the world's cropland may cover an area between 1.22 billion and 1.71 billion hectares, a range that varies by more than 40 percent.
via New Farm Maps Offer In-Depth Picture of Global Agriculture.