The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS) recently released its Major Land Uses (MLU) study for the US for 2007. The MLU series is the only accounting of all major uses of public and private land in all 50 States.
The US land area totals nearly 2.3 billion acres. According to the report...
Cropland: Between 2002 and 2007, total cropland decreased by 34 million acres to its lowest level since this series began in 1945...
While...Urban and Rural Residential land acreage quadrupled from 1945 to 2007, increasing at about twice the rate of population growth over this period. Land in urban areas was estimated at 61 million acres in 2007, up almost 2% since 2002 and 17% since 1990 (after adjusting the 1990 estimate for the new criteria used in the 2000 Census). The Census Bureau estimates that urban area increased almost 8 million acres (13%) during the 1990s.
