If we grew all the food in the US using this approach, farmland requirements could drop by 94 percent, the researchers claim.
“The technology enables food production in vertically integrated systems, reducing the land requirement for traditional crop cultivation. For example, if fully implemented in the U.S., electro-ag could potentially reduce agricultural land use from 1.2 billion acres to just 0.14 billion acres,” Feng Jiao, one of the study authors and a professor at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU), told ZME Science.
Such dramatic reductions in agricultural land would free up vast areas for ecosystem restoration and carbon sequestration.