Can farmland acerage be increased?

Question

if so, how?

Answer 1

You could put the land the in CRP back into service, you could do a land reclamation but other then that no.

Answer 2

not in my opinion there is only so much land and if it hasn't been plowed up by now it never will be .Its either to wet to rocky or so poor that nothing will grow on it.The only way to increase farm land would be to remove the buildings on the land and return the top soil that was removed for the construction and begin the farming process lol

Answer 3

There's a lot of farmland not being used that can be put into use.  The problem (commonly called the Malthusian Problem) is that currently, the best farmland is in use.  Any more will be more and more marginal- you get diminishing returns.  For this reason Malthus in the 18th century predicted increasing food scarcity putting  a cap on a rather hungry and desperate population- not a pretty picture.

Luckily, he was wrong.  He didn't see advances in the intensiveness of agriculture rather than extensiveness.  We produce dramatically more food per acre than we used to, and this continues to increase, through mechanization, selective breeding, synthetic fertilizers, irrigation, and now a more nuanced understanding of crop plants' place in ecological systems.

My question to you is why do you want to put more acreage into use?  There's no real strain on available farmland.  While we need to be a bit less wanton about plowing under good land for malls, all the food shortage problems we percieve in our world are ones of poor practive or limited distribution.

The only reason to put more land into use would be for biofuel production, but that is really a poor use of land, as all the farmland in the USA wouldn't dent our motor fuels needs.  Cellulosic ethanol (using the byproducts of agriculture) and CO2 conversion from powerplants (bubbling a coal plant's efflux through oil producing algae beds) are going to be more efficient in terms of land use.