2 Simple Maps That Reveal How American Agriculture Actually Works

January 16, 2015
Los Angeles

Driving by a farmlands of Iowa looking for uninformed food to eat is a lot like sailing by a sea looking for uninformed H2O to drink. In a ocean, you’re surrounded by H2O that we can’t drink; in Iowa, you’re surrounded by food we can’t eat. Even nonetheless Iowa generates a second-highest volume of income of any state off a crops — $17 billion in 2012 — a strenuous infancy of that comes from margin corn, that is unfailing mostly for animal feed and ethanol, not cooking plates.

I came on this extraordinary fact while perplexing to answer a clearly elementary question: What stand generates a many income in any state? The Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistical Service

To get some-more suggestive results, we motionless to frame divided those crops that are used mostly for animal feed, and concentration on crops that people indeed eat. we plotted a formula on a map, that suggested some startling trends:

All that wheat! It seems nobody’s told heartland farmers about a gluten-free trend utterly yet. The non-wheat states are even some-more interesting. Some are expected: oranges in Florida mushrooms of Pennsylvania

I was also struck by what a map didn’t

So we did a small some-more research to find out a commission of any state’s stand output, in terms of dollar value, that derives from a crops we had creatively excluded: corn, soybeans, sorghum, barley and hay. we plotted these percentages onto a map as well. The result, if we squint, looks a small like an electoral map in a unequivocally terrible year for Democrats:

This second map shows that there are unequivocally dual opposite Americas when it comes to agriculture: a heartland, where cultivation is focused on beef and dairy, and a coasts, where it’s focused on fruits and vegetables.

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Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/16/largest-crop-each-state_n_6488930.html?utm_hp_ref=los-angeles&ir=Los+Angeles