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Did you drop a zero? On an all-potato diet, assuming intensive cultivation (40,000 lbs/acre yield) you could feed about 20 people on one acre. That's 200m^2 p
by mattgrice 10y ago
Did you drop a zero?
On an all-potato diet, assuming intensive cultivation (40,000 lbs/acre yield) you could feed about 20 people on one acre. That's 200m^2 per person. For a varied diet that might contain chicken and eggs, 1000m^2 (a quarter acre) is more reasonable.
- mabbo 10y agoIt's possible. I dumped a lot of variables into Wolfram Alpha in a big equation and it came out with an answer in "m^2 per person" units. Also, it's not a practical minimum but a theoretical one, like supposing we had so many plants absorbing light that it's dark underneath them, etc. In reality, potatoes can do about 17m cals per acre per year, and a human needs nearly 1m per year. In short, Matt Damon definitely wasn't growing enough potatoes (in the film version at least).