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What do you think the largest crop in the US is? Hint: Turf grass. Figure all the land used to grow lawns plus all the land used to grow grass seed plus all t
by Pfhreak 7y ago
What do you think the largest crop in the US is?
Hint: Turf grass.
Figure all the land used to grow lawns plus all the land used to grow grass seed plus all the land to grow sod... It's absolutely staggering amount of land, whole integer multiples of the land we use for corn or any other irrigated crop.
- sixstringtheory 7y agoI couldn’t quite believe this so I looked it up: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_55d0dc06e4b07addcb43435d https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_55d0dc06e4b07addcb43435d Link to the actual paper, from 2005, is in the article.
- sokoloff 7y agoPaper cited suggests 164K km^2 (about 40 million acres) of total turfgrass. USDA estimate for corn crop in the US is almost 92 million acres. Note that the paper claims that turfgrass is 3x larger than the largest irrigated crop, not that it's larger than all crops. Only about 20% of US corn is irrigated (~80% is rain watered only). [1] - https://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/milesi.pdf https://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/milesi.pdf [2] - https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/07/29/corn-americas-largest-crop-2019 https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/07/29/corn-americas-lar...