The Midwestern United States has lost 57.6 billion tons of topsoil due to farming practices over the past 160 years, and the rate of erosion, even following the U.S. Department of Agriculture's ...

The company estimated it will have to remove the top two feet of soil from a roughly 75,000-square-foot area — that's roughly 1.72 acres. It's bigger than the size of a professional football field.

A year later, the team discovered that the Midwest has lost 57.6 billion metric tons of soil since Euro-American cultivation of the region began, approximately 160 years ago.