The world in 1900 and now. In 1900 farms covered 19% of the planet's ice-free land; today they cover 37%. Swipe between the two maps to see where the new fields and pastures came from, which forests went, and where the trees came back.
Picture the world in 1900. Steam ships and railways already tie the continents together, and the prairies of North America, the Pampas of Argentina and the steppe of southern Russia are being ploughed for wheat. But most of the Brazilian Cerrado is open savanna, the forests of Sumatra and Borneo are largely intact, much of inland Australia is not yet grazed, and Europe is farmed harder than it is today. What did the land look like then, and how different is it now?
The best answer comes from HYDE, the History Database of the Global Environment, built at Utrecht University and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. Its latest version, 3.3, estimates cropland, pasture and rangeland on a grid of 5 arc-minutes (about 9 km at the equator) for every decade back to 10,000 BCE and every year since 2000. For 1900 it rests on old censuses and agricultural statistics, spread over the land by population and suitability; for 2023 on FAO statistics. I set its maps for 1900 and 2023 side by side, add its anthromes (a classification of land into settled, farmed, seminatural and wild), and check the present against a satellite land cover map from MODIS.
HYDE puts the world's cropland at 9.0 million km² in 1900 and 16.3 million km² in 2023, 1.8 times as much. Grazing land grew faster, from 15.7 to 32.0 million km². Together that is 24.7 million km² of farmland in 1900 and 48.3 million now, out of 129 million km² of land free of ice (Antarctica is not on the grid). In 123 years, farming took in another 23.5 million km², an area 2.6 times the size of the United States.
The ice-free land in 1900 and 2023
Share of 129 million km² of ice-free land (Antarctica excluded). HYDE 3.3. Hover for values.
Most of the new farmland is grazing land, and most of that is rangeland: natural grassland, shrubland and savanna grazed by livestock, as across inland Australia, the Sahel or the steppes of Central Asia and China. HYDE counts 21.4 million km² of it now, against 7.4 million km² of more intensively managed pasture and 3.1 million km² of converted rangeland, grazing land that was once forest. A map of grazing land is therefore not a map of cleared land: much of it would still look wild from the air.
World cropland and grazing land, 1700 to 2016
Million km². The long series is HYDE 3.2 (the previous version, the latest with yearly world totals I could reuse); the dots are HYDE 3.3 for 1900 and 2023. Hover for values.
The 20th century did most of the work. In HYDE 3.2's world totals, farmland grew by 15.4 million km² in the two centuries from 1700 to 1900, and by 13.3 million km² in the half century from 1900 to 1950 alone, as railways, steamships and refrigeration opened the grasslands of the Americas, Australia and Russia to the world market. Since 1990 the world total has grown far more slowly: by 0.8 million km² to 2016, against 9.5 million in the four decades before.
Of 179 countries and territories with at least 1,000 km² of land, farmland grew in all but 26. By region, the largest gains were in sub-Saharan Africa and South America, then East Asia and Oceania. Only Europe has less farmland than in 1900.
Change in farmland by region, 1900 to 2023
Million km², cropland plus grazing land. Labels give the share of the region's ice-free land farmed in 1900 and 2023. Click a bar to zoom the map.
Country by country, China (+2.4 million km²), Brazil (+2.4) and Australia (+2.4) gained the most farmland, then the United States, Argentina and Kazakhstan. The kinds of change differ. In Brazil much of it was clearing: the Cerrado, the great savanna of the interior, went from 3% farmed in 1900 to 41% now, and the southern rim of the Amazon from 1% to 23%. In Australia and China it was mostly new grazing land, much of it dry rangeland. In Southeast Asia it was cropland: rice, rubber and oil palm took the share of farmed land from 12% to 37%.
Some famous farm belts were already there in 1900. The US Midwest and Corn Belt was 50% farmland in 1900 and is 50% now: the prairie had been ploughed in the half century before. The Great Plains further west went from 46% to 80%, the Kazakh steppe, ploughed in the Soviet Virgin Lands campaign of the 1950s, from 50% to 82%, and the Argentine Pampas from 18% to 68%.
The biggest changes in farmland by country, 1900 to 2023
Thousand km², cropland plus grazing land, HYDE 3.3. Click a bar to see the country.
The United Kingdom is one of the countries where little changed in total: farmland covered 66% of its land in 1900 and 73% now. But the mix moved from plough to grass, with cropland down from 79,197 km² to 57,183 km².
HYDE does not map forest itself, but it does map where forest would grow naturally, using the WWF map of the world's biomes, and which of that forest zone is farmed. The forest zone covers 58.8 million km², 46% of the ice-free land. In 1900, 16% of it was under crops, pasture or converted rangeland; in 2023, 27%. Net, farming took another 6.4 million km² of the forest zone.
Share of the natural forest zone in farming use, by region
Per cent of the forest zone under cropland, pasture or converted rangeland. Bar: 2023; tick: 1900. HYDE 3.3.
That net figure hides two movements. Across the forest zone, 7.6 million km² went into farming in places where farming grew, and 1.2 million km² came out of it in places where farming shrank. Brazil cleared the most (+1,092,709 km² in farming use), then China, Indonesia, Australia and India. The land that came out of farming is in the old farm countries: 87% of it is in Europe, Russia and the United States. In the eastern United States, east of 90°W (roughly the Mississippi), farmed land fell from 38% of the forest zone in 1900 to 31% now, as farms were given up from New England to the Appalachians and much of the land grew back to woods. In Europe it fell from 50% to 42%, with the largest declines in France, Poland, Italy and Germany.
The forests that came back are in the countries that cleared theirs first. The forests going now are in the tropics.
How does that compare with what satellites see? MODIS, classifying the land at 0.05 degrees in 2019, finds closed forest on 36% of HYDE's forest zone, and forest or woody savanna on 53%, below HYDE's 73% unfarmed. The difference is land that is not farmed but not forest either: logged, burnt, degraded or naturally open. Cell by cell, the share HYDE has farmed and the share MODIS finds without trees agree only loosely (correlation 0.49 across 120,913 quarter-degree cells). MODIS's cropland, 13.1 million km², is 80% of HYDE's for 2023. Remember both when reading the forest layer: it shows farming in the forest zone, not forest.
The anthromes put every cell into one of 20 classes by its people and its land use: dense settlements, villages, croplands, rangelands, seminatural lands (with some people or use, but mostly natural) and wildlands (no people, no use). In 1900, 35% of the ice-free land was in the first four, used anthromes. By 2023 it was 52%.
Anthromes in 1900 and 2023
Share of ice-free land in each group of anthromes, HYDE 3.3. Hover for values.
Surprisingly, the wildlands barely moved: 25% of the ice-free land in 1900, 24% now. Of the land that was wild in 1900, 94% is still classed wild. It is the land that is too cold, too dry or too remote to farm: the Sahara and the Arabian and Australian deserts, the tundra, and the boreal forests of Canada and Siberia, where 77% of the remaining wild woodlands lie north of 50°N. The great loss was in the middle, the seminatural lands, inhabited but mostly natural, which shrank from 40% of the ice-free land to 24% as they were turned into croplands, rangelands and villages. Dense settlements, cities and their surroundings, grew 3.7 times over, to 1.8% of the land.
Nobody mapped the world's fields in 1900. HYDE starts from statistics: national and regional censuses of agriculture where they exist, the FAO since 1961, and for earlier years estimates from population and land per person. It then spreads each country's total over its grid using rules: cropland goes where people live and the soil and climate suit crops; grazing goes where it is dry or empty. So the 1900 map is a model. Country totals are better than the pattern inside a country, and a single 9 km cell should not be read literally. The uncertainty grows with distance from good statistics: in 1900 that means much of Africa, Asia and South America.
There are other limits. HYDE has no forest of its own: its forest zone is potential natural vegetation, and "cleared" means farmed, so logging, fire and plantations do not show. Grazing land includes vast natural rangelands. And HYDE 3.3 has a baseline, a lower and an upper estimate; I use the baseline. The present-day check uses MODIS 2019, a satellite classification with its own errors, at a different time and with different definitions.
Farmland. I summed HYDE 3.3 baseline cropland, pasture, rangeland and converted rangeland (km² per 5 arc-minute cell) for 1900 and 2023. Grazing land is the last three together, as in HYDE. Shares are of HYDE's maximum land area; "ice-free" removes land in the anthrome class "ice, uninhabited". Forest zone. HYDE's general file of potential forest (from the WWF biome map) marks the forest zone; cropland, pasture and converted rangeland inside it count as farmed. Gross gains and losses are the sums of cell-by-cell increases and decreases. Countries and regions come from HYDE's country grid, named with Natural Earth. Anthromes are HYDE's own maps for 1900 and 2023. MODIS: the MCD12C1 IGBP classes for 2019, compared with HYDE on a quarter-degree grid. The map shows all of this on a 10 arc-minute grid (about 18 km). Every number on this page is computed by the scripts in the repository and checked against data/results.json.