America is losing about three million acres of agricultural land every year, according to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Democratic senator from Vermont. This, if true, indicates that on a national basis, major strides are yet to be taken to reverse a shortsighted trend of gobbling up croplands for highways, housing, and businessindustrial development. Leahy himself took a significant step toward correcting the problem when he introduced a “Federal Farmland Protection Policy” amendment to the 1981 farm bill. The Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee voted unamimously for the amendment, The Senate will consider the bill later this year. The Leahy amendment would force federal agencies to take a second look at actions that take land out of agriculture. It would require that federal agencies consider alternatives to the programs that encroach on such land, coordinating with preservations efforts of states and localities. Just a year, ago Sen. John A. Durkin, D-N.!-l., told Congress that roads. subdivisions and other enterprises are taking over cropland at the rate of more than four square miles a day. Durkin referred to an article in the New York Times by Rupert Cutler, assistant agriculture secretary, who said the nation is on the brink of a “crisis in loss of farmland that soon may undermine our ability to produce sufficient food.” A dwindling farmland base has ominous longterm implications by way of self-sufficiency and national security. With an increasing awareness of the problem, many states and localities across the nation are now vigorously trying to retain the precious land resource through effective land use policies. Leahy claims that federal policies of hopscotch development and careless land use actually are leading contributors to the serious national problem. In some cases such policies “impede state. local and individual efforts to conserve cropland,” he says. Enactment of the Leahy amendment as part of the farm bill would be a step toward the national effort America needs to solve the problem of vanishing agricultural lands.