Corn field in North Dakota
Photo from Matt Dente's flickr stream
From a promotional video for Pioneer Herculex seed:
"If we were to take 20 kernels off the tip of this ear on a population 30,000 stand, that's gonna be about a 6 bushels per acre loss; or $12; or you could even take it to $30 a bag."
Being that the extent of my exposure to farming is restricted to a season on a 4-acre organic farm, it's pretty amazing to me to consider the scale of what farming really is in this country. I'm not trying to shill for DuPont and all the other chemical companies-turned seed companies, but it's an interesting illustration of just how much food gets produced by a relatively small segment of the population.
Were we to have grown corn on the farm I worked on, it's doubtful that a few kernels here or there would have made much of a difference - we would have just sold the ears (assuming the damage wasn't grotesque) and that would have been that. Of course, on a 10,000 acre corn farm, few kernels off each ear can obviously add up to an awful lot of corn.
