Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
reclamation efforts were needed to put more land under cultivation, and its total
rose from just over 2 Mha in 1600 to 3.2 Mha by the late 1860s.
Among the populous countries with the oldest cultivation, the greatest farmland
expansion took place in China: the total increased by little more than 10% during
the seventeenth century but rose by nearly by 25% during the eighteenth century
(to about 85 Mha, largely thanks to forest conversions in the southern provinces)
and a further 10 Mha were added by 1900, mostly in the three northeastern prov-
inces suitable for large-scale plantings of wheat, corn, and soybeans. Between 1750
and 1900, Europe's cultivated area expanded by nearly 50%, that in South Asia
doubled, and the conversion of temperate grasslands to grain i elds became one
of the formative developments in the history of Canada, the United States, Australia,
and to a lesser extent Russia.
Russia's cultivated land nearly tripled between 1750 and 1900, with new crop-
land added both in the European part of the country (mainly in eastern Ukraine
and in Russia's southern provinces between the Dniepr and Volga and north of the
Caucasus), as well as in southern Siberia (Koval'chenko 2004). During the same
period the North American total expanded from a relatively small area cropped in
Britain's coastal colonies along the Atlantic and in Quebec to about 170 million ha,
an increase of two orders of magnitude. During the nineteenth century the U.S. total
expanded roughly 20-fold, to nearly 145 Mha, with most of that gain commencing
only after 1850 with the great westward expansion of the American state and with
mass-scale conversion of the Great Plains to grain i elds (Schlebecker 1975).
The U.S. historical statistics list total land in farms (including cropland, pastures,
wood groves, and fallow land) going back to 1850, when it amounted to about 117
Mha; by 1900 it was nearly three times as much at 336 Mha. In 1850 close to 60%
of all land in farms was in the southern Atlantic states, and that region still led in
1900 (with 43% of the total), but the north-central states (essentially the Corn Belt
from the Dakotas to Kansas and from Nebraska to Missouri) were a close second
(with 38%), and two decades later they moved into i rst place. Land conversions in
the western states were also signii cant, with the region's land in farms rising from
less than 2 Mha in 1850 to nearly 40 Mha by 1900, with California being the
leading contributor. Data on actually harvested U.S. cropland begin in 1880, with
about 66 Mha: that total had nearly doubled by 1900, to 113 Mha, and by 1920
it had reached 139 Mha.
In 1750, the cultivated land in territories that later (in 1867) formed Canada was
limited to less than 30,000 ha in the eastern maritime region, now the provinces of
Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick. By 1900 the total, at more
