ABSTRACT
The United States is blessed with an abundance of high quality farmland, rangeland and forest land. This chapter describes this cornucopia in order to provide a context for evaluating the conversion of agricultural land to other uses. It looks at current and future demand for US agricultural products, and the potential for the US farmland base to meet the needs. Any farmland bordering a major urban area is unique in terms of its proximity to that city. More than half the value of US farm production is generated in counties in or near urban areas. Farmland at the urban fringe is critical to the development of localized food systems. Most recent studies of farmland conversion are based on one or both of two major data sources-the Department of Commerce's Census of Agriculture and the US Department of Agriculture's National Resources Inventory (NRI).
