Fun With Math - Kernels Galore

Having a free few moments, this blog set out today to determine how many total corn kernels are currently housed at the NAC warehouse.

The answer: 60 million.

The math was based on the fact that it took NAC team members 1 1/3 ag bins loaded with kernels in order to fill 1,000 large bags.

So: 16 ag bins x 750 large bags per ag bin x 5,000 kernels per large bag= 60,000,000 total kernels.

That includes 1,000,000 now in the large bags on display in the warehouse.

For an inefficient food crop like corn that only produces one or two ears per plant per cycle, 60 million is a lot of seeds. Of course, corn needs lots of irrigation and
can't really propagate without human help.

The above, far as we can figure, are facts.

What follows is more summer movie-style, unrelastic guestimation. Stuff that, for this blog anyway, is fun to wonder about...

If the above means that an acre of corn can multiply itself by a factor of 60 per cycle, then in 5 cycles 28 acres (hypothetically) exponentially multiplies to 21.7 billion acres.

To put 21.7 billion acres into perspective:

The entire North American continent (includes Central America and the Caribbean) is 6.1 billion acres.
The entire land surface of THE WORLD is 36 billion acres.

Have a nice day.