> The shrinkage in use of farmland could be that marginal farmland is falling away due to soil exhaustion and economic effects. Well if you want to disagree wi

> The shrinkage in use of farmland could be that marginal farmland is falling away due to soil exhaustion and economic effects. Well if you want to disagree with all expert assessments, then feel free. > That sounds like the path towards arcologies. If humans voluntary adopt this, then I don't see the problem. If people want to get a cheap large house in Texas, they can just go ahead and do that. > Take Los Angeles, California California is hardly the typical case. Just because you experience this locally doesn't change global statistics. > Sure, but that's just part of the same problem: as population and wealth rises, the wish to have personal rapid transit also rises, which leads to either: Yes. But using ethanol never made a lot of sense in the US. It purely because of politics. We are not fundamentally energy restricted, you could easily substitute ethanol for methanol for example. Gas is actually demand constraint in the US right now. Again, we do not have a lack of energy or land supply. My example about ethanol was more to prove that we have more then enough farm land. I don't understand what your issue with this accepting this is. > At the grandparent level, my family were farmers. The land they did all of that on is now sold off for houses. Again, you continue to assert completely 100% false statistics. The waste majority of land is not covered by houses. In fact there are people who are trying to recreate the North American Step because there is so much empty land. > You speak of increasing productivity for our existing farmland, but all increasing curves flatten out eventually. There are no exponential curves in ecologies, only S-curves that haven't started to flatten out yet. (Or, collapsing curves!) Productivity will continue to go up. We have new technology such as GMO that can make a major difference. The reality is that most of the worlds farm land is not farmed with anywhere close that efficiency. Would could have massive amount of food production growth if we had more adoption of current technology. I really don't understand any of your arguments. We have lots of access land. We have so much land we can use part of it for ethanol and another huge part for meat. If there were any real constraint on food production, those things would change. Its the same in other countries, Britain used to be intensively farmed and now they are talking about establishing a prehistoric forest across the whole for northern Britain because they DON'T NEED LAND TO FARM. Its the same in many countries. That is a simple fact, however much you want to invent stories about your grand parents farm. WE ARE NOT CONSTRAINT IN THE AVAILABILITY OF FARM LAND! Even if land was the issue, we could still do very efficient factory farming where land is not a constraint at all.