How Companies Can Help Address Declining Farmland

published on forbes.com - september 28, 2023. Shashi Raghunandan is a Forbes Councils Member.

According to the American Farmland Trust, between 2001 and 2016, America lost about 2,000 acres of farmland and ranchland every day. This means in that time, we lost about 10 million acres of farmland. Meanwhile, the USDA reports 943 million acres of farmland in 2001, compared to 893 million acres in 2022. Whatever the number, this is sizeable.

To put this in perspective, we are talking about feeding approximately 20 to 40 million people annually from the farmland that we have lost. This is true not just in the U.S. but globally! Many countries have lost farmland over the last few years. They have lost it to urban development, alternate energy and soil/water degradation.

In 2022, I took a field tour of several farms in the U.S. as part of a venture studio program. It struck me that every single morsel of food that we consume has a link back to farmland in some way. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), 95% of all food that we eat is produced on land. I had never really appreciated this connection, and my interest has only grown over time as I studied farmland practices, leases, ownership and fertility globally.

I discovered a whole new world that made me appreciate the linkages between farmland, food, health and the environment, with farmland serving as the cornerstone of that linkage, and the more it amazed me, the more concerned I got. So I set up a company to solve this challenge, with a mission to connect farmland to their best stewards—the farmer—and, through that, stem this decline in farmland.