In Kazakhstan desertification has meant that nearly 50 percent of cropland has been abandoned since 1980.
That's equal to about 1 percent of all the cropland we have in this country.
The scents are applied to the top of a cylindrical cage set on the edge of cropland.
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Others farmers are selling or leasing their water rights to burgeoning cities, taking cropland out of production.
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Calls to exterminators spike in September when they migrate from cropland to attics.
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Once the internal combustion engine made society mobile, a lot of cropland was magically converted into commercial and residential development acreage.
This program pays farmers to convert cropland into grassland or forest, in order to preserve soil and create more habitat for wildlife.
Because the areas of land involved in non-cropland agriculture on all continents are so vast, the economic, the political and military significance is simply mind-blowing.
But the Ogallala is completely interconnected underground and significant pipeline spills and wellhead catastrophes could affect more cropland and human health than any other disaster, including climate-induced droughts.
"Continued urbanisation is hampered by the rigid central planning rules governing the conversion of designated cropland into construction land, which partly reflect misguided concerns about food security, " it said.
But farmers devoted more cropland to corn and soybeans as prices of those commodities rose, and when the U.S. economy rebounded in 2009, cotton supplies started to pull tight.
By some estimates, it would take nearly two and a half times the 180 million hectares of current U.S. cropland to produce sufficient plant material that could be refined into enough biofuel to replace petroleum diesel altogether.
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If all those fantasies become reality, the U.S. could, in theory, meet all of its transportation fuel needs with ethanol by 2050 without adding to today's current cropland, according to an exhaustive study by the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental group based in New York.
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