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Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

> pesticide use is lower...

It's not. Europe uses somewhat lower amount of pesticides because it has more land that regularly freezes which helps to control insects.

When corrected for that, Europe uses more pesticides for similar climates.

> yields are higher than in the US.

They aren't, when corrected for the land area.

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What do you mean by "corrected for the land area"? According to this study, in the period 2016-2020 wheat yields per acre were more than twice as high in Germany than in North Dakota or Kansas.

https://ag.purdue.edu/commercialag/home/resource/2022/05/int...

North Dakota and Kansas are deserts or near desert. Germany gets 2 to 7 times more rain per year (depending on which part of Germany you look at)

That is probably a major reason for the higher yields in Germany, but the person I replied to claimed that yields aren't really higher in Europe than in the US.

According to data from the UN, in 2020 North America used 2.77 kg pesticiedes per hectare cropland and Europe used 1.69 kg/ha, and yet Europe has higher yields per hectare. So clearly Europe uses less pesticedes per produced amount of food.

https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/RP

I'm sorry, I was a bit unclear. Instead of:

> They aren't, when corrected for the land area.

I should have said "for the geographical area". You need to compare yields in similar climates and soils.

A better comparison would be ND and Ukraine in terms of climate.

Maybe, but both are large enough and have enough regional variation that it isn't safe to compare like that. The worst regionsare much worse in ND, and the best much better in Ukraine.

You need to compare yields for the land in similar climatic conditions. This is complicated, because most of the US is to the south of most of the European landmass. New York is on the same latitude as Madrid.

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