There are 900 million acres of farmland in the United States, broken into more than 2 million farms. This accounts for approximately 40% of all acreage in the US. Much of this farmland is used to raise livestock and grow corn and soybeans. But not all of it is used to produce foodstuffs for direct human consumption — a lot of it is used to produce food for livestock. This makes livestock and other animal production farms and facilities ancillary beneficiaries of US farming. Agriculture, food production, and related industries (such as food manufacturing and retailing) were responsible for $1.055 trillion of the United States’ gross domestic product in 2020 — 5% of the overall GDP. To look at the environmental impact of domestic food waste, OhmConnect cited data from the EPA publication From Farm to Kitchen: The Environmental Impacts of US Food Waste, released in November 2021.
