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 immense environmental and economic potential — land that, researchers write, was abandoned at a rate of over a million acres a year between 1986 and 2018.
The analysis used satellite data and cropland information from the U.S. Agriculture Department to map the locations of abandoned cropland and how long it had been out of use. The researchers conclude that during the study period about 12.3 million hectares — or 30.39 million acres — of cropland went unused in the contiguous United States.
The biggest changes took place around the Ogallala Aquifer, whose groundwater irrigates parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming, and which has been drying out because of excessive pumping and droughts. Other abandonment hot spots were located around Mississippi, the Atlantic Coast, North Dakota, northern Montana and eastern Washington state.