Vis Critique: Farmland usage change in the US

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Bloomberg Graphics is one of my favorite places to check when looking for example of visualizations used in storytelling. Most of their articles are well done but the example below is an exception. The author wanted to show how farmland usage changed changed across US counties in the last 20 years. Each chart presented in the article showed the increase or decrease for a specific crop such as wheat or soybean. A cloropleth map would have worked fine here. But instead of using a color scale to represent percentage change, we have thin bars centered on each county, making the overall visualization busy and difficult to read.




























Original Article: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-crop-shift/

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