Farmland comes in many forms and shapes. A staggering three-quarters of the agricultural area is used for livestock, including both grazing and animal feed production. It is hard not to marvel at the sheer scale of agricultural sites when flying over them in a plane. But it is important to keep in mind that this massive expansion in agricultural land use<\/strong> has happened quite recently. While 2000 years ago the total farming area was below 0.5 billion hectares, it is now approaching 5 billion hectares. As you may imagine, many of these farms are not operated in an ecological and sustainable way, which has been part of the success story of feeding the global population with increasing efficiency (i.e., decrease in land required per person has dropped from 1.2 to 0.6 over the past 50 years[2]). However, this comes at the cost of biodiversity due to the use of pesticides and monoculture, and a negative impact on the climate. Especially the increased cattle farming has led to a sharp increase in the atmosphere’s methane levels, a greenhouse gas 78 times more potent than CO2 on a 20-year scale, which has contributed to a third of the global warming observed to date[3].<\/p>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n

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