Wasted Space

I read this interesting statistic yesterday....

America has thirty-five million acres of lawn and thirty-six million acres devoted to housing and feeding recreational horses, and that doesn’t even count golf courses.

Salatin, Joel Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World (p. 77). Center Street. Kindle Edition.

That is some 70 million acres devoted to grass that produces basically nothing. At 640 acres to the square mile that works out to  109,375 square miles. For comparison sake, England is 50,346 square miles and Greece is 50,949 square miles, so in the United States we have the equivalent of two entire European nations worth of grass that we spend billions of dollars, who knows how many gallons of chemicals and untold amounts of energy and time either mowing to meet an arbitrary standard of neatness or caring for horses that we mostly look at. The lawn care business (and the larger general industry of landscaping suburban homes that sit in neighborhoods that are largely abandoned during daylight hours) is a huge one and one of the most frivolous and unnecessary that we have.

I like our horses and I don't mind having some lawn but I do kind of question whether we need acres of meticulously manicured lawns and pastures full of horses that mostly stand around and turn hay into manure. Just something I found interesting,