Farmland is land used for growing crops or raising animals for food. When you drive through the countryside and see fields of corn stretching to the horizon, herds of cattle grazing in pastures, or orchards heavy with apples, you're looking at farmland.

Farmland makes civilization possible. Without it, there would be no steady food supply, no cities, no schools, no time for anyone to invent or create anything because everyone would spend their days hunting and gathering just to survive. The world's farmland, worked by farmers across every continent, feeds eight billion people.

Not all farmland looks the same. In Iowa, farmland might mean thousand-acre fields of soybeans harvested by enormous machines. In Vietnam, it might mean terraced rice paddies climbing up hillsides, carefully tended by hand. In Kenya, it might mean fields of tea plants or coffee shrubs. What makes land farmland isn't its size or what grows there, but that someone uses it intentionally to produce food or other agricultural products.

The quality of farmland varies greatly. The best farmland has rich soil, adequate rainfall, and flat or gently rolling terrain. Poor farmland might be rocky, too dry, or have thin soil. Throughout history, societies have flourished or struggled largely based on how much good farmland they possessed.