 Time now for Focus on the Field with your Ag Director, Agriculturalist Bridget Riegel. About 30 million acres of cropland shifts to other uses is occurring. That cropland in the United States has shifted to grassland, pasture, shrub forests, and wetlands between 1986 and 2018, according to a study published in Environmental Research Letters in March and cited by the Washington Post. Both the authors of the study and the Post describe the land as abandoned.