• Using biotech, the first attempts to introduce wild genes from close relatives of our crop plants are raising yield potential by 30 to 50 percent.
• In 1998, it took most Americans just 40 days to earn enough money to pay for their food supply for the entire year. In 1970, it took Americans about 51 days.
• The erosion rate by water on U.S. croplands has been reduced by 24 percent in the last 15 years.
• Each day, approximately $6 million in U.S. ag products, such as grains, oil seeds, cotton, meats and vegetables are consigned for export to foreign markets.
• American agricultural exports generate more than $100 billion annually into business activity, and create jobs for nearly a million workers throughout the U.S.
• In 1996, $69.7 billion worth of American ag products were exported around the globe.
• Computers are used on 83.8 percent of American farms.
• Of the highest quality farmland in the U.S., 70 percent is located in only 14 state. Between 1982 and 1992, nearly 2 percent of prime farmland was lost to other uses, such as residential and commercial development.
• It was estimated that throughout the U.S., between 8 to 10 million acres of herbicide-tolerant soybeans, made possible by biotechnology, were planted in 1997. That represents about 15 percent of the total soybean acreage.
• Approximately 10 million acres of insect-protected corn, made possible by biotechnology, were planted in 1997, accounting for about 12 percent of all corn planted.
• According to some recent studies, no-till practices could help solve the global warming problem. According to these studies, an acre of no-till corn will take 9,000 pounds of carbon out of the atmosphere.
• USDA estimated the number of farms in the U.S. at 2.06 million for 1997. That number is down less than one percent from the previous year.
• Total land in farms was 968 million acres in 1997, which is down less than one percent from 1996.
• The average farm size in 1996 was 471 acres.
• Dairy product consumption in the U.S. is nearly 586 pounds per person annually.
• Soy ink was introduced to the newspaper industry in 1987. Now, more than 90 percent of the nation’s 1,500 daily newspapers use soy ink, including Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Washington Times and USA Today.
• Soy ink is naturally low in volatile organic compounds, and its usage can reduce emissions, helping control pollution.
• Approximately one billion people worldwide go to bed hungry every night.
• Production of food has increased 230 percent since 1940 and doubled since 1960, using about the same amount of cropland.
• Without pesticides, the world food supply would drop about 40 percent, which would mean that 2 billion less people would be fed. Pesticides are essential to high-yield farming.
• We’re still cropping virtually the same 1.5 billion hectares that we were cropping in 1946—even though the human population has tripled.
• Organic farmers get only about half as much output per acre of farmland as modern mainstream farmers. That means they would need twice as much cropland to produce today’s food supply.
• If agriculture converted to strictly organic farming, we’d have to clear another 5 or 6 million square miles of wildlife habitat for crops. That’s equal to the total land area of the U.S. and Mexico.
• Organic farming might wind up costing the world millions of square miles of wildlands, billions of tons of topsoil and thousands of wildlife species.
Reprint permission given by AgAir Update, P.O. Box 850, Perry, GA 31069 - an international agricultural aviation publication.
Return to Spreading the Facts