1.6 million acres of Great Plains grasslands were destroyed in 2021 alone, World Wildlife Fund says

Over the course of 12 months, an area of Great Plains grasslands bigger than the state of Delaware was erased from the map. In 2021 alone, 1.6 million acres were plowed across the United States and Canada to make way for primarily row crop expansion, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s annual Plowprint Report, released Thursday.The report analyzed grasslands plow-up in North America using government data and satellite imagery from the past two years. Since 2012, the region has had 32 million acres of its landscapes destroyed. But the land most suited for farming in the Great Plains was plow...