Analysis and Characterization of Farmland Loss in Idaho

Agriculture in the United States will face novel difficulties from many human pressures, including climate change, soil quality decline, overuse of water resources, and conversion to residential and commercial development. There is overlap between the best farmland and the best places for urban development, so we are at risk of losing agricultural lands that will be most resilient to climate change and its effects. However, farmland loss is not an isolated issue, and it could lead to more immediate, systemic issues like rising food costs, dependence on imported food and loss of livelihoods in rural communities, which could then lead to rising poverty and political instability especially if environmental pressures such as droughts are mismanaged, all of which need their own resources to address as problems of their own. Because of this, it is critical to make the rural communities where agriculture is socially and economically important more resilient and adaptive to these issues. In Idaho, there has been a significant increase in the population during the past couple of decades, which has caused shifts in the economies of rural communities and land use change of cropland. To determine which counties are experiencing the most agricultural land loss and what socioeconomic factors they have in common, we used US Census data of demographics and jobs, and annual maps of land from 2011-2021 to characterize counties in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. Then, we used K-means clustering to find which counties are most similar to each other, identifying common socioeconomic factors in counties that are experiencing the most agricultural land loss. Our goal is to find which socioeconomic factors are associated with agricultural land loss in the United States so that farmland protection strategies that are successful in one county may be replicated in similar counties, and so that the counties most in need of those protection strategies can be identified.