Data Is Beautiful

No, we use it to vote.

It seems a little inefficient to put all the airports together

So, if most people are going vegan, there would be much more space for other stuff, yes?

So nice of the 100 largest land owning families to have the same amount of land as the entire urban or rural housing population of the rest of the country. I assume it's to fatten themselves up for the rest of us just like the cows.

When do we get to eat them again?

Why do they keep allocating land to wildfires if they're so destructive? /s

Golf is way too big, imo. No other sport even makes the list here.

Fuck golf

Gotta see one of these with parking.

TIL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weyerhaeuser

Man that guy Urban needs so many houses... What does he even do with them all?

It's quite interesting that "rural highways" is one of the categories identified, but not any other sort of improved road. The data source has a base granularity where one square is 250,000 acres (~100,000 hectares), and then additional state data is factored in for increased precision. It supposingly being USDA data, they might primarily care only about those highways used to connect farms to the national markets.

That said, I would be keenly interested in the land used for low-volume, residential streets that support suburban and rural sprawl, in comparison to streets in urban areas. Unlike highways which provides fast connectivity, and unlike dense urban-core streets that produce value by hosting local businesses and serving local residents, suburban streets take up space, intentional break connectivity (ie cul de sacs), and ultimately return very little in value to anyone except to the adjacent homeowners, essentially as extensions of their privately-owned driveways.

It may very well be in USDA's interest to collect data on suburban sprawl, as much of the land taken for such developments was perfectly good, arable land.

"Wildfires" is a surprisingly large area. I wonder what the 2025 area for it is.

Get rid of livestock

I have certainly heard of Weyerhauser, but had no idea they were that big. They're the only 'individual' owner shown. The land-owning families is odd as I'm sure it overlaps a lot with pasture and private timberland.

I think the graphic would be better if some of the data were nested by size and relationship. IOW Agricultural land would have grazing, food production, feed production, etc. in decreasing size nested over an area. Might give greater sense of how much land is used for ag. Same for forestry; Forestry, parks, commercial logging, etc.

And people will still say that the meat/dairy industry aren't a plague

I would love to flip the railroad usage and cow pasture usage.

Also, mfs drinking too much corn syrup.

Remember, not all land is the same. Some is too dry to grow human food. Some too wet. There are also other things that land is either too or not enough.

Where's the amounts used strictly for cars?

Can we put the 100 largest landowning families in Florida, then saw it off from the rest of the country?

Food we eat is sepperate from cow pastures...

Nice!

Tobacco is still at least 2,000x too big.

Defense is a surprisingly large use of land. How is that? Can anyone explain the most land intensive uses of the Armed Forces? Like tank training areas maybe?

Can't figure out why the 100 largest landowning families aren't using their land for any of the other reasons. Surely some of them are having it farmed for them too?