As we saw in the chapter on food, farming technologies employed since the early 1960s have saved an area equal to two South Americas from being turned into farmland. Between 1995 and 2010, land used for farming increased only by 0.04% annually. The researchers Jesse Ausubel and Iddo Wernick even project that humanity has reached ‘peak farmland’, and that land use for agriculture will decline by 0.2% annually from 2010 to 2060.
