With the upcoming planting season upon us, let’s review a few facts about agriculture and our main crops. It is a vital U.S. industry, but it remains largely unseen for most Americans. We go to the supermarket and buy food for our families – and generally take for granted the fact it’s available and in abundance.

To keep up with population growth more food will have to be produced in the next 50 years as the past 10,000 years combined. Today, the average U.S. farmer feeds 155 people. In 1960, a farmer fed just 26 people. Today’s farmer grows twice as much food as his parents did – using less land, energy, water, fertilizers, pesticides and fewer emissions.

American farmers ship more than $100 billion of their crops and products to many nations. U.S. farmers produce about 40 percent of the world’s corn, using only 20 percent of the total area harvested in the world.

Farmers are a direct lifeline to more than 24 million U.S. jobs in all kinds of industries. In the past five years, U.S. farm operators have become more demographically diverse. The 2007 census counted nearly 30 percent more women as principal farm operators. The count of Hispanic operators grew by 10 percent, and the counts of American Indian, Asian and African-American farm operators increased as well.

A few facts about corn include the following. One bushel of corn is 56 pounds. That means U.S. farmers produce an average of more than 9,000 pounds of corn per acre.

If U.S. farmers used crop production practices from 1931 to produce an amount of corn equivalent to the 2008 crop, it would require 490 million acres—an area more than 120 million acres larger than the state of Alaska. The U.S. produces about 40 percent of the world’s corn – using only 20 percent of the total area harvested in the world.

Individuals or families own 82 percent of corn farms. Another 6 percent are familyheld corporations. Less than 15 percent of U.S. corn acres are irrigated. Farmers today produce 70 percent more corn per pound of fertilizer than as recently as the 1970s.

Corn farmers have reduced total fertilizer use by 10 percent since 1980.

According to the USDA, one acre of corn removes about 8 tons of carbon dioxide from the air in a growing season and at 180 bushels per acre produces enough oxygen to supply a year’s needs for 131 people.

Corn production has marched steadily upward for decades while using fewer acres. American farmers produced the five largest corn crops in history during the past five years.

Even after supplying foodmakers, ranchers, ethanol producers and grain exporters, America will again be able to save 10 percent of this year’s harvest for the future.

Farmers today grow five times as much corn as they did in the 1930s — on 20 percent less land. That is still 13 million acres, or 20,000 square miles, twice the size of Massachusetts. The yield per acre has skyrocketed from 24 bushels in 1931 to 154 now, or a six-fold gain. And the Agriculture Department expects the average yield per acre to double in the next 25 years.

We will provide some facts about cotton in next week’s edition. For more information on conservation and programs, please contact the Natural Resources Conservation Service office in Kingsville at 401 East King Avenue, Ste. 100 or call at 592-0309 Ext. 3.