Here's a thought-provoking map making the rounds. It's a rather capricious summary of a series of maps depicting land use across the 48 states. The starting data points look more like this spangled map:
What it does rather well is show how very much land is devoted to the livestock industry (including of course dairy), and how little goes to growing everything else we eat - falling mostly into the "special use" (!) category in the lower map, and condensed in the rust belt in the one above. But it's otherwise bizarre, lumping all timberland in the west and all cities in the northeast! All just so one can say the "100 largest landowning families" own territory the size of the state of Florida?
