Did You Know?
Even if you don’t live on a farm, agriculture is an important part of your every day life. Here are a few fun facts about America’s largest employer:
Awesome Animals
- A dairy cow produces 1,500 gallons of milk every year — that’s 16,000 glasses.
- In just one day, a dairy cow can drink 35 gallons of water and eat more than 50 pounds of feed and hay.
- Hamburger meat from one steer makes about 720 burgers.
- There are 914 different breeds of sheep throughout the world.
- A pig can run a seven-minute mile.
- A piglet weighs about 3.5 pounds a birth and doubles its weight in the first seven days of its life.
Various Vegetables
- Lettuce is the second most popular fresh vegetable in the U.S. — the average American eats 30 pounds of it every year.
- California grows 70 percent of the asparagus in the U.S. That works out to about 50,000 tons per year from the Golden State.
- Believe it or not, the average American eats 4.5 pounds of broccoli every year. That’s up four pounds per person from how much we ate in 1970.
Fruit Facts
- The average tart cherry tree produces about 7,000 cherries. That’s enough to make 28 cherry pies.
- Michigan and New Jersey produce 66 percent of all the blueberries in the U.S., followed by North Carolina, Oregon and Washington. Blueberries are the second most popular berry in the U.S.
- There are 500 different kinds of bananas. Banana trees, which are technically classified as herbs, can be up to 20 feet tall.
- During the winter, apple trees need to spend 900-1,000 hours at temperatures below 45 degrees in order to fruit and flower the following spring.
- The U.S. provides one-fourth of the world’s peach supply.
Fun with Food
- Every year, Americans eat 17.3 billion quarts (1.12 billion pounds) of popcorn. That averages out to 68 quarts per person.
- In 1998, U.S. hens laid more than 6.6 billion dozen eggs. An egg shell can have up to 17,000 pores on its surface, allowing it to absorb nearby flavors and odors.
- It takes 24-26 hours for a hen to produce an egg. There are 30 minutes between each egg-producing cycle.
- Think your job is hard? Take a look at the workload of a honey bee:
- Honey bees tap two million flowers to make one pound of honey. Each worker bee makes one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.
- In one day, a honey bee can fly 12 miles and pollinate up to 10,000 flowers.
- A hive of bees flies more than 55,000 miles — at 15 mph— to produce one pound of honey.
- Americans love pasta! In 2005, we ate 1.3 million pounds of it. That’s enough spaghetti circle the earth nine times if the packages were laid end to end.
- Americans eat 100 acres of pizza every day, which means we down
about 350 slices every second.
- In a year, every American eats 46 slices (23 pounds) of pizza.
- Pepperoni is our favorite topping. Anchovies are our least favorite.
- Popular international pizza toppings include squid (Japan), green peas (Brazil) and a minced mutton/tofu combination (India).
- There are more than 61,000 pizzerias in the U.S.
- Every American eats 125 pounds of potatoes per year.
- Farmers grow corn on every continent except Antarctica.
- One bushel of wheat makes 73 pounds of bread. A family of four could live off the bread produced from 1 acre of wheat for 10 years.
- Ohio leads the U.S. in production of Swiss cheese. The state is second in egg production.
- Pennsylvania ranks first in mushroom production nationally, turning out 443 billion pounds per year.
Really Random Tidbits
- One acre of trees can remove 13 tons of dust and gases from the environment every year.
- Every year, each American uses a whole tree — 100 feet tall and 16 inches in diameter — to fulfill his or her wood and paper needs.
- It was once thought that pumpkins could remove freckles and cure snake bites. Pumpkins are 90 percent water and the flowers are edible.
- Pancake batter is almost identical to the batter used to make regular cake. Pancake batter is just a little thinner.
- It takes 40 days for the average American to earn enough money to pay for a year’s supply of food. It takes 129 days to earn enough money to pay a year’s worth of federal, state and local taxes.
- Farmers and ranchers provide food and habitat for 75 percent of the nation’s wildlife.
- It takes 9 seconds to combine enough wheat for 70 loaves of bred.
- There are 340 million M&Ms made every day.
- One bushel of corn can sweeten more than 400 cans of pop.
- Abe Lincoln’s mother died when the family cow ate poisonous mushrooms and Mrs. Lincoln drank the milk.
- One acre of soybeans can produce 82,368 crayons.
- One bale of cotton can make 1,217 men’s T-shirts or 313,600 $100 bills.
- One U.S. farmer feeds 129 people every year.
- The American farm population is 1.9 percent of the total population. There are 2.7 million farms in this country — 145,156 operated by women. The average farm is 469 acres.
- It costs approximately $2,300 per year for one person to eat. That means Americans spend less than 10 percent of their annual income on food, which is the lowest percent in the world.
- Ohio is one of only four states in which more than 50 percent of the land is classified as “prime farmland.”
- There are 27.1 million chickens; 1.26 million head of cattle; 1.7 million hogs; and 141,000 sheep in Ohio.
- Pennsylvania usually gets about 42 inches of rain every year.
- Commercial timberland covers about 80 percent of West Virginia.
- Statistics show 83 percent of U.S. farmers use computers. Nearly three-quarters use a cell phone and one-third have Internet access.
- About 30 percent of today’s farmers have attended college, with more than half getting a degree.
- Every hour of every day, about $6 million in U.S agricultural products are consigned for shipment for export to foreign markets.