A Satellite View of Our Food and Agriculture System

Back in February, Joel had a blog post about the Summit to Fight Factory Farms that he attended. Along with his slideshow that showed some factory farms as seen from a plane, he linked to a Google Maps section in North Carolina. Here you can see the long, low buildings for housing hogs or poultry in CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) and the lagoons for their manure.

A new post on the U.S. Food Policy blog uses a similar Google Maps approach to highlight ten different areas shaped by our food and agriculture system. From strip mines in Florida used to extract phosphates for fertilizer to farmland converted to housing developments in Pennsylvania, these maps are vital for helping us see our agricultural system from a different perspective.