Agriculture can be a bit of a misnomer 🌾

Agriculture means field cultivation. Cultivating fields is a big part of farming but a lot of agriculture, is not field crops as much as grasses.

Grasses for pasture and hay, converted by rumens, especially beef cattle 🐮 into meat 🥩. A lot of areas aren’t really well suited for field crops and tillage due to slope and shallow soils but grow grass pretty darn well. Some corn silage 🌽 is a required for high performance Holstein dairy cattle but not so much for beef and other breeds.

You can see that well on the National Land Cover Dataset for New York. There are far more acres of pasture and hay (yellow) than cultivated crops (brown) even in many rural farming parts of the state. 🗺