NYT: The Dizzying Grandeur of 21st-Century Agriculture

[jberryhill]

3. Just some back of the envelope from numbers in quick searches

Quickly googling US per capita pork consumption (around 51 pounds), how much pork one gets from a pig (120 pounds), and US population (318 million), I come up with 135 million pigs needed to satisfy domestic consumption.

So if 100 pigs are raised on 210 acres, then we're going to need 1.35 million 210-acre farms, which works out to around 443,100 square miles, or just under 8 Iowas (without anything else in them).

At some point, the consumption needs to go down and/or the price go way up. But people seem to think that there is a magic planet somewhere that can continue to meet consumption without either (a) continued density of production or (b) price stability.

The magic in all this is having such a wide separation between people and what they eat, that most people have no idea how or where their food is produced and what is required to produce that much at that price. Because food comes from 'the magic food place' for most people, then we are not going to be able to make rational choices about what we eat or how we produce it. I have no idea how this story is going to end.