[jernfrost]

That is what the future of any food production is. Organic and traditional food production is terrible for the environment because it consumes far too much land. We are destroying far too much wildlife to produce food using traditional methods.

Indoor food production either as mentioned here or as in bio reactors and hydroponics systems use something like 100-700 times less land for the same food production.

Think how much land could be given back to nature if we use these more efficient methods and managed to stabilize our population growth.

Forests and fields could be populated by wild animals again.

[avcdsuia]

I share the same desire, but since we put price tags on land, it would be a tremendous effort to collect funds to buy land back and most people just don't have the incentive to make that happen. It's just a fantasy.

[dkural]

The value of land would go down if food production shifted elsewhere.

[logfromblammo]

In general, it's the current-time value of perpetual production in a particular use, multiplied by the likelihood the land would be put to that use in the future.

So if International Paper owns a square mile currently used for fast-growing trees, the value of the land is the value of the next lumber harvest, discounted over the amount of time left until it's ready, plus the harvest after that, discounted by even more time, and so on, forever. Then you add the value from a developer that thinks, "this plot is really close to Townsburg, and I could build houses here that would get annexed". So you add the value of the land as residential housing, times the probability IP would sell to the builder.

It's the same for food. Most farmland is rather far away from anywhere people might want to build houses. The few houses that exist nearby are only there because the people that live there need to be closer to the open land than the cities. So if it stops being useful for growing food, it's value drops to the next-best use, which is probably not housing. One of those uses might be preserved wildlife habitat. It all depends on where it is, and what it's next to, and the perceived value of a particular use.