CROP YIELD VERIFICATION

The statistical information listed In the tables below represent a crop-by-crop average yield of 47 foods (in pounds per acre), according to two different sources. If we calculate the average yield for all of these crops we find it to be 10,642 pounds per one acre of land. Therefore, the yield for 1/4 acre is 1/4 of that, or 2660 pounds.

If you grew equal amounts of all these crops (except rice -- I excluded rice because it is so unusually high-yielding, and it takes lots of water to grow rice) on 1/4 acre of land, how many pounds of food per day does that average out to be, in the course of one year, if you had one harvest season per year?





2660 lbs./year = 7.3 pounds of food per day for one person.

365 days/year





Do the crop yield figures (shown below) seem a little bit too high for you? Do you really think that you could get, for example, 19,400 pounds of carrots out of only one acre of land? One acre of land is 43,560 square feet, according to Random House Dictionary. If that was a square piece of land, that would be 208.7 feet long on each side of that square. (The "square root" of 43,560 is 208.7) If you produced 19,400 pounds of carrots out of 43,560 square feet of land, that would be less than 1/2 pound per one square foot of land:





19,400 lbs. per one acre = .445 pounds per ONE square foot of land.

43,560 square feet per one acre





If you went into a supermarket to the bulk produce section, and weighted some carrots on the scale, you would see that a half pound of carrots is a small handful of carrots. Can you visualize this half-pound of carrots in a square piece of ground that is one foot long on each side? It appears to be reasonable to me!