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How many acres of ag land does it take on average to support one person in the US with food for a year?
To put it another way, for each acre of ag land given up to a city, how many fewer people can be fed. I realize it depends heavily on what and how much a person eats, ie. a small vegan would require way less than a large meat eater. But there is an average or a range. I'm thinking along the lines of simple numbers like so many bushels of corn per acre and how many bushels each day to feed a person for a year.
Ignoring imports and exports creates a huge error given our exports. The error for eating animals is likely to be smaller. If one knows the efficiency of conversion of corn to cow for example that helps. I would guess that is about 25% but I have no data to back me up.
1 Answer
- virtualguy92107Lv 71 decade agoFavorite Answer
People worldwide eat not only agricultural products, but a varying amount of livestock that eats agricultural product, so a direct conversion of calories per acre of corn, for example, will give a severe underestimate of the acreage required.
For a quick approximation of an upper limit, the U.S. uses 18% of its 9.2 million km2 of land as arable (crop) land. That's 17 million km2, which supports 300 million people ignoring import/export. A km2 is 247 acres so it's about 20 acres per person as currently used.
If you do the same calculation for India, you get about 2.4 acres.
Source(s): CIA World Factbook, odci.gov google for area conversion factor