I have discussed how indigenous people tend
to have a more direct connection to the land than we do in western society.
However, whether indigenous or not we all fundamentally rely on the land for
food. We cannot just magic food out of nowhere. In other words, our livelihoods
ultimately still depend on the land. Therefore, in this post I want to
summarize the final project that I did for my GIS class. For this project I
chose to examine agriculture and its future expansion potential in Washington
State. I originally wanted to do this analysis for BC, not Washington, but the
necessary data was not available so I chose the next closest place.
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| My land and people connections triangle. This post focusses on livelihood |
Background:
We are living in a world where food
security has become a key source of debate and is viewed by many as one of the
greatest challenges facing humanity: how can we produce enough food to feed the
global population? The FAO (2012) estimate that food demand will be 60% higher
by 2050. Some argue that the problem is one of distribution not quantity, yet
most people seem to agree that increasing food supply is going to be critical.
There are two main ways to increase agricultural production:
1. Agricultural expansion
2. Agricultural intensification
For my project I chose to focus on the
first of these two points with regard to Washington State, in the USA. Is Washington fulfilling its agricultural
potential or are there significant areas of suitable agricultural land that are
not currently being farmed? I used GIS analysis to assess the extent to which
agriculture in Washington could be expanded. My analysis focused on Washington’s
top 3 cereal crops: wheat, corn and barley.
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Map of the United States, with Washington highlighted
in red. It is located directly below BC.
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Method:
My analysis had three main steps:
1.
Identify environmentally viable
land for production of wheat, corn and barley.
2.
Identify environmentally viable
land that does not currently have another competing land use.
3.
Identify environmentally viable
that does not currently have another competing land use and is not already
farmed
(therefore allowing me to calculate expansion potential).
These steps in a
bit more detail….
1.
I first identified all areas of
Washington that are suitable for the production of these crops under natural
environmental conditions by overlaying data layers relating to mean annual
temperature, mean annual precipitation and soil pH.
2.
However, some of these areas
may currently have other land uses that render them unavailable for converting
to farmland, such as urban development, forest cover and water bodies. I
accounted for these by overlaying land use data layers and excluded these areas
from my assessment of potential farmland.
3.
I then wanted to determine how
much of the potentially farmable land that I had identified is already farmed.
To do this I overlaid crop specific data layers that show which areas of
Washington are currently under production for wheat, corn and barley. This
allowed me to locate the areas where potentially farmable land overlaps with
land that is already farmed. To calculate expansion potential I then took my
total estimate of agriculturally viable land and subtracted the area of
overlap. In other words, this quantified the land that could be farmed for
these crops but is not farmed for them at the moment.
Results:
I
ended up with some interesting results, as shown in the three maps below. Each
map corresponds to one of the three cereal crops investigated (wheat, corn and barley).
On the maps I have displayed areas of current crop growth, areas of potential
crop growth (as identified through my analysis) and areas where potential and
current crop growth overlap.
The two tables below summarize my results and
use these results to calculate the expansion potential for each crop. The first
table refers to absolute area (in acres) and the second table refers to area as
a percentage of the total area of Washington State.
Two main observations can be drawn from
these results:
1.
Firstly, there is very little
overlap between areas identified in my analysis as suitable cropland and areas
where these crops are currently grown. In fact, the two seem to occupy opposite
areas to each other.
2.
Secondly, the expansion
potential of wheat and barley is negligible, while the expansion potential of
corn is huge! For corn I estimated that
over 7 thousand acres could be brought into production (under natural
environmental conditions). This equates to approximately 15% of the total area
of Washington State.
Discussion
1.
There are a number of reasons
why there may not have been significant overlap between current and potential
farmland. First, my assessment of
agricultural viability relies entirely on three very basic environmental
parameters. This is likely to be a significant oversimplification of necessary
growth conditions. I used mean annual averages that do not take into account
environmental variation within the year and may hide extreme maximums and
minimums. There are also other significant environmental and non-environmental
factors that influence growth that I did not take into account, such as slope
aspect and topography. Secondly, the majority of modern agriculture is not
conducted under natural environmental conditions. Irrigation, fertilizers and
other soil amendments tend to be added to enable naturally unsuitable areas to
become agriculturally viable. From the maps it is clear that the current extent
of agriculture is not limited to areas that are viable under natural
conditions. As such, areas of land that are more accessible, more convenient or
closer to cities but less naturally viable may be chosen over less accessible
areas that are naturally viable.
2.
Corn is renowned for having a wide
environmental tolerance range and therefore it figures that my estimates
suggest that it has the greatest expansion potential. Despite this, at the
moment more wheat is grown than corn. This may be due to greater demand or a
higher market price for wheat than corn (even once fertilizer and irrigation
requirements are taken into account). However, if my expansion potential that I have estimated in
my analysis is even roughly accurate this suggests that there is indeed
significant scope for expanding grain production in Washington State.
Furthermore, this is under natural environmental conditions. If fertilizer and
irrigation are included in analysis perhaps this expansion potential would be
greater still.
References:
References:
FAO, WFP and IFAD. 2012. The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012.
Economic growth is necessary but not sufficient to accelerate reduction of hunger
and malnutrition. Rome, FAO.