The world’s agricultural farmland is shrinking but production is up. Can this trend continue?

Throughout the 20th Century, humanity demanded more and more land leading to the loss of vast areas of natural forest and grassland. Today, around half the world’s land is farmed, used to grow crops or graze animals.

However, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), global agricultural land use peaked in the early 2000s and has been slowly falling ever since. Around the world, farmland is being replaced by grasslands, trees and bush. Wild animals are returning to abandoned pasturelands in areas they had once dominated.

There are a few different reasons for this. Firstly, farming has become more efficient. The use of improved seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and irrigation has in recent decades vastly increased how productive the land we farm is, doubling, tripling and even quadrupling yields ….

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What will happen in the future? We think current trends are likely to continue, with more and more land previously used for agriculture being freed up across the world. But this process could also accelerate further due to a range of promising technologies and solutions ….

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