Midwest U.S. landscape change to 2020 driven by biofuel mandates

Abstract

Meeting future biofuel targets set by the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) will require a substantial increase in production of corn. The Midwest, which has the highest overall crop production capacity, is likely to bear the brunt of the biofuel-driven changes. In this paper, we set forth a method for developing a possible future landscape and evaluate changes in practices and production between base year (BY) 2001 and biofuel target (BT) 2020. In our BT 2020 Midwest landscape, a total of 25 million acres (1 acre = 0.40 ha) of farmland was converted from rotational cropping to continuous corn. Several states across the Midwest had watersheds where continuous corn planting increased by more than 50%. The output from the Center for Agriculture and Rural Development (CARD) econometric model predicted that corn grain production would double. In our study we were able to get within 2% of this expected corn production. The greatest increases in corn production were in the Corn Belt as a result of conversion to continuous corn planting. In addition to changes to cropping practices as a result of biofuel initiatives we also found that urban growth would result in a loss of over 7 million acres of productive farmland by 2020. We demonstrate a method which successfully combines economic model output with gridded land cover data to create a spatially explicit detailed classification of the landscape across the Midwest. Understanding where changes are likely to take place on the landscape will enable the evaluation of trade-offs between economic benefits and ecosystem services allowing proactive conservation and sustainable production for human well-being into the future.

Effects of Land Use Change for Crops on Water and Carbon Budgets in the Midwest USA

“…The study domain provides a contiguous landscape encompassing large portions of the Midwestern plains, temperate forest, and croplands. The 12 states also include about 80% of operational U.S. bioethanol production facilities (total of 210) as of November 2013, making them the primary location of corn expansion to meet the ethanol production demand [10,15].…”

“…The study domain provides a contiguous landscape encompassing large portions of the Midwestern plains, temperate forest, and croplands. The 12 states also include about 80% of operational U.S. bioethanol production facilities (total of 210) as of November 2013, making them the primary location of corn expansion to meet the ethanol production demand [10,15]. To evaluate the impacts of recent LULCC, we built two crop distribution maps based on the USDA NASS Cropland Data Layer (CDL) database [16] (Table 1), and then aggregated the data to a 5-min spatial resolution to match that of the atmospheric forcing.…”

Modeling the Impact of Urban Landscape Change on Urban Wetlands Using Similarity Weighted Instance-Based Machine Learning and Markov Model

“…Because of these changes, several studies (e.g., [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]) have examined the changing urban landscapes of several locations globally. For instance, within the United States, researchers have sought to understand the dynamics of urban landscape changes to account for their causes, patterns, responses and implications [12,13]. Jones et al [12] considered landscape change to be one of the greatest threats to aquatic and terrestrial resources in many areas of the United States, which have had a negative effect on surface waters and terrestrial habitats, especially forests in many parts of the nation.…”

Identifying Factors Controlling the Continuous Corn Yield Penalty

“…Th e EISA mandate has substantially increased domestic demand for corn grain. Meeting the EISA biofuel targets without loss of livestock, animal feedstock, or grain for human consumption will require additional increases in corn production on existing farmland (Mehaff ey et al, 2012). If projected increases for corn demand are substantiated, CC production will inevitably increase.…”