But the parts of Missouri that I frequent are not exactly prime crop land, mostly wooded or pasture land.
If crop yields had remained stagnant since 1900, in the year 2000 we would have needed nearly four times more crop land to feed everyone.
Meat accounts for a sixth of humanity's calorific intake but uses roughly a third of its crop land, water and grain.
There is already fierce competition between the need for forests as habitat (to preserve biological diversity) and the demand for more crop land and wood fuel.
Even during Malthus's lifetime, crop land was being expanded rapidly as forests were felled, and innovations such as crop rotation and selective breeding brought large increases in yields.
The solar trade association's advice goes further, recommending highly productive crop land be avoided and only land graded 3b, 4 or 5 be developed for solar farms.
And it's a reasoned primer on the risks of bio-engineered crops, which he says now cover about one-fourth of the crop land in the United States.
Ahmed's report shows that if prawn farming is expanded to 2.83m hectares of seasonally inundated crop land, Bangladesh would earn an additional $9.4bn£6.3bnbn) annually.
By Thursday, he was facing hundreds of acres of flooded crop land — some of which he and others had successfully defended with sandbags until just a few days ago, until the water broke over the top.
He listed five threats to the survival of the planet: lack of fresh water, destruction of forest and crop land, global warming, overuse of natural resources and the continuing rise in the population.
Whatever the benefits or the problems of ethanol, the fact that it is taking up so much crop land is a big driver of inflation, and the Fed cannot do much about the effects of that.
