(REASON) “If during the next sixty to seventy years the world farmer reaches the average yield of today’s US corn grower, the ten billion will need only half of today’s cropland while they eat today’s American calories,” concluded agronomist Paul Waggoner in his seminal 1996 article, “How Much Land Can Ten Billion People Spare for Nature?”
In their 2013 article, “Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing,” Waggoner and Rockefeller University researchers Jesse Ausubel and Iddo Wernick citing current global trends in yield increases and fertilizer deployment calculated if biofuel production could be reined in, that as much as 400 million hectares (1.5 million square miles) of current cropland could be returned to nature by 2060. That’s about 25 percent of the land currently devoted to growing crops. “Now we are confident that we stand on the peak of cropland use, gazing at a wide expanse of land that will be spared for nature,” the authors concluded.
