Green, green grass

NASA's Earth Observatory has published a national map of what I would call "turfness". I cropped it to show those areas of the mid-Atlantic with high levels of "Lawn Surface Area in the United States", where NJ, Boston and Long Island all stand out as very turfy. In New Jersey, lawns have been determined to be an impervious surface which performs roughly the same ecological function as asphalt. But the national trends are equally fascinating:

For example, lawns appear to cover more than three times the number of acres that irrigated corn covers.

The research was led by Cristina Milesi at Ames Research Center who described lawns as the largest cultivated crop in the US.