Environment

Farming Shift

Researchers have developed a map that shows where the world’s major food crops could successfully be moved to combat climate change and greatly reduce the need for irrigation.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment, they propose expanding agriculture around the corn belt in the American Midwest and south of the Sahara desert.

This would allow vast tracts of farmland in Europe and India to revert to their natural ecology, allowing CO2-eating forests to grow back in the process. By cultivating crops in places where the scientists believe that rainfall would provide all the needed moisture, water resources could be more targeted to the planet’s thirsty and growing human population.