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>there's plenty of pristine, hardly used, soil around.

Gonna need a [citation needed] on that one.

Find an old growth forest and dig a little.

Or the side of a mountain/valley where it's hard to farm, but plants grow just fine.

Drive through the flyover states and you can see it all for yourself. If you're not on the interstate, you can drive at 80mph without seeing another car for some time.

It's actually really beautiful how untouched some parts of the US are. Hopefully they can stay that way for some time.

The Midwest may have a low density of cars, but the arable land is largely farmed; it isn't pristine, untouched wilderness.

I was born on a farm in rural Ohio, so I can appreciate the difference. I'm thinking more of Wyoming.

But that land is probably not suitable for farming - because if it was, someone would probably have a farm on it. So then you're comparing soil-not-great-for-farming from then and now, which is something, but it's not what we really care about (soil-used-for-farming).

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