*3.1. Land Use*

In recent decades, the demand for growing agricultural products has been partly met by increasing cultivated land [14]. However, in the future, the e fficiency of agricultural production and specific yields must be increased, since there is serious competition for existing agricultural areas. Various relevant studies outline an increasingly gloomy prospect, namely that increasing yields will not be able to meet the demands for raw materials [15–17]. Nowadays, the increase in agricultural performance is mainly due to the cultivation of new areas, which is hardly sustainable in the long term. Consequently, new areas must be incorporated into agricultural production. Agricultural production needs to expand faster than population growth and this objective needs to be achieved in a sustainable way without further damage to the environment. The driving force behind development is sustainable intensive farming, which means the even more e ffective utilization of agricultural land and water resources [18].

Urbanization takes away an increasing amount of agricultural land and puts pressure on current land use and biodiversity as well [19]. According to estimations, the growing food demand will require approximately 320–850 million hectares of agricultural land additionally by 2050. The demand for additional agricultural land is limited by the changes in future dietary habits, which will mainly be influenced by socio-economic developments in developing countries. Depending on these changes, consumption will be shifted towards food sources of animal origin by 2050 due to improving welfare.

Moreover, this will cause a major change in land use as well, since the demand for feed crops will increase [20]. In addition, future yields based partly on the introduction of new plant varieties and improved agronomic practices will determine how much arable land will be needed. The requirement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions originating from agriculture will inevitably limit further land allocations [21]. At the same time, it should also be taken into account that the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture depends largely on the attitude of producers as they are the ones who are directly a ffected by the e ffects of climate change. Farmers who believe in climate change and its anthropogenic or man-made nature are much more open to reducing greenhouse gas emissions but, at the same time, farmers are often more easily able to adapt to changing circumstances than to reduce emissions of harmful substances [22].
