> From: Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > From: "The Fool" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > > The farmland from say Iowa, alone could feed the entire population of the > > world. As it stands 99% of food produced in Iowa and other states goes > > to feed animals. A lot of it goes to ethanol production to, not just animal feed. > Well, my father-in-law is a farmer who lives about 20 miles from Iowa. A > darned good yield for corn is 200 bushels/acre. Assuming that 100% of Iowa > yields this much (which is clearly an overstatement), we have a yield of > 7.1 billion bushels of corn from Iowa's 35 million acres. The world's > population is about 6.3 billion. That is slighly more than 1 bushel of > corn per person. It's certainly possible (if impractical) to get up to 400 bushels an acre. http://www.ncga.com/02profits/CYC/2001profiles/aanonirr.htm Then you have the government paying people not to plant crops (that whole supply/demand thing, the reason why all farming should be done by the government and not by people for profits). > Do you stand by the claim that the entire population of the world could be > fed from crops produced in Iowa? 1.1 bushel of corn per year converts to > to about 0.1 liters of corn on the cob per day. I cannot imagine that > amount of food being enough to live on. A slight bit of hyperbole. I was meaning to show that a. The whole population as it stands could reasonably fit in a small area, b. the food supply could also be grown in a reasonably small area. .1 liter is still half an ear of corn, which would suggest that only a couple of times the area of Iowa would be needed (2 to 4), about roughly the area we were discussing for use by the population. Also, I think there are better crops than corn to plant. I was trying to say that less than half of the united states (lower48) could reasonably house / sustain the entire population of the world. a fraction of the surface of the world.
