Peak Farmland Is Coming Closer Thanks To Cow-Free Milk

“Peak Farmland” may be closer than we thought. Peak farmland is the simple notion that at some point, we can reduce the amount of land that we devote to farming. Technological change in farming pushes yield per acre up. If yields grow at a faster pace than consumption, then supply will grow faster than demand. Marginal farmland will be abandoned and will revert to grasslands or forests. This idea was advanced in a path-breaking paper by Jesse Ausubel, Iddo Wernick and Paul Waggoner.