It can take up to 500 years to produce 1″ of topsoil – farmland is not easily renewable!
Sprawl Pressures Remaining Farms
As one local farmer said, “Farmers don’t make good neighbours.” And farms just can’t ‘move’ elsewhere. Crop type and success depends on soil conditions, water availability etc. So if we force farmers out of areas with high quality farmland for houses, it leaves them with poorer quality farmland. That means less yeild and less options for them on how to make a living.
Sprawl Ruins Farmland
As you can see, farmland is not only a limited resources, but is also disappearing at an alarming rate. Although government policies are in place to protect farmland, the Neptis report shows that those policies have not made an impact on the amount of farmland spared. We need to stand together and let governments know that our local food is more important than houses.
Sprawl on Farmland = Profit
Unfortunately, greenfield development is quite easy for developers, as well as lucrative. The land has already been cleared and it’s cheap where a developer may pay a few thousand dollars per acre for farm fields, the value flips to tens of thousands of dollars per acre once rezoning has been approved (Almack 2001).