Here’s how much cropland could be freed up if Americans ate half as much meat "A national flexitarian diet would reduce the amount of U.S. farmland by roughly the size of South Dakota" ...

About 30 million acres of U.S. cropland have been abandoned since the 1980s, a new analysis suggests. The study, published in Environmental Research Letters, offers a detailed look at land with ...

Compared to intensive land use, sustainable land use allows better control of underground herbivores and soil microbes. As a result, the soil ecosystem is more resilient and better protected from ...

A major global study found that up to 17% of the world’s cropland is contaminated with toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, and lead — posing serious risks to public health and food ...

More information: Min Jiang et al, A 20-year dataset (2001–2020) of global cropland water-use efficiency at 1-km grid resolution, Scientific Data (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41597-025-04904-1 ...

Up to 17 percent of the planet’s agricultural land may be contaminated by toxic heavy metals, a new study has found. As many as 1.4 billion people reside in areas with soil dangerously polluted ...

UD assistant professor Kyle Davis (center) and doctoral candidate Bhoktear Khan (center right) recently had a paper published in Sciences Advances that focuses on cropland expansion in Nigeria. Davis ...

Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., has introduced the Farmers Freedom Act of 2025 to provide a permanent definition of prior converted cropland -- land farmed prior to Dec. 23, 1985 -- in federal law.