Reversing Agricultural Disinvestment

Andrew Leonard on the butter shortage in Japan:

The problem: You can pour milk down the drain in an instant, and kill off your herd of cows in a blink of eye. But you can't reverse the process so quickly. Building up a productive dairy herd takes years.

Unfortunately, I think it will also prove to have been easier to build exurban developments on farmland than to return the land to local agricultural production.