Corn fields occupy how much of each state? | Hacker News Reader

Corn fields occupy how much of each state?

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31 pointsgrainstats24 comments

If you've ever driven through the Midwest, you already know you can drive hours through the landscape and see one thing: Corn fields

I took it up on myself to see exactly how much space Corn Fields occupy in each state, and the results are quite interesting.

Here are the top 3 Corn states by surface area occupied by Corn

1. Iowa 36.4% 2. Illinois 29.7% 3. Indiana 23.6%

The US also is one of the top producers of Soybeans, Wheat, and Cotton, which also occupy much of the Midwest and Plains, but not as much as corn does. To see those maps, please see this blog post! :)

https://www.blog.grainstats.com/p/occupy-agriculture

You have to be careful about doing simple aggregations when it comes to stats about acres planted.

The same piece of land may get planted twice in a year, which would mean it is reported twice in those stats.

In warm-winter states it may be more easily done, but even in cold-winter states you have this kind of thing: https://www.agriculture.com/crops/wheat/how-winter-wheat-can...

Among the issues reported by other comments, those over index for the size of the state. Nebraska produces close to twice as much corn as Indiana for example, it’s just a much larger state.

For those looking for concrete data:

Iowa: 13.1M acres

Illinois: 11.2M acres

Nebraska: 9.95M acres

Minnesota: 8.6M acres

Indiana: 5.45M acres

Ohio: 4.75M acres

Source (switch state name at end of url for others): https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...

> If you've ever driven through the Midwest, you already know you can drive hours through the landscape and see one thing: Corn fields

Oh, yeah? I dare you!

Even here in Iowa, there are plenty of soybean fields among the cornfields. Not to mention the groves near old farmhouses and numerous creeks and rivers also lined with trees.

It would be an interesting challenge to see how far someone could drive surrounded only by cornfields. I'll even allow corn-free travel inside city limits.

Have you seen the "Jesus in the Wheat" billboard?

People think of corn as a vegetable, but it’s really just a quantized excitation of the corn field. As corn fields expand to have an increased number of states, and those states become lower energy, the relaxation of the corn excitons releases energy, which is why we’ve been mandating its use in motor vehicle fuel. It really makes things pop. And who knows… maybe a kernel of truth in this.

Are there virtual corn popping in and out of existance everywhere?

I would be interested in something similar, but for any crops, or even be able to filter by crop type.

Or maybe there is a map/list of each zone by state (e.g. commercial, industrial, government, residential, farm, etc.).

I doubt Hawaii or Alaska would have any meaning percentage, but annoying that they're missing from the map.

Who controls the midwest controls the grain and who controls the grain controls the world.

Such a great map. Would love to see the respective data visualized for the entire world.

This is great! Iowa could probably use a rename to something corn related

It's named after the Ioway tribes, who grew lots of corn!

Not so sure about "lots of" corn. That seems like retconning.

Yes, they grew corn, quash, and beans. They were also semi-nomadic and hunted. Until they were placed on reservations in Kansas and Nebraska, where they started raising livestock.

They weren't really notable for growing corn.

That’s all uncontroversial...but appreciate adding it and sorry for the informal language! :)

TIL; thanks for sharing!

My wife and I drove I-80 east to New York from the western states in 2010. When we arrived in Iowa there was a sign for a Welcome Center (typical when crossing state lines on interstate highways in the US). The signs promised free wifi. How nice, we thought. We followed the signs and they wound us deep, deep, deep, back into a field of corn. It got quieter and quieter. Nothing but the rumble of my 1999 CR-V's engine and the whispering of the wind through the corn. My wife (hailing from the Bay Area) kept saying, "This feels sketchy. This is hella sketchy. Dude, we're gonna get shot."

We got to the Welcome Center. It was abandoned. Windows were broken. The parking lot was in disrepair. It was completely encapsulated in corn. It looked like a great place for a young couple to get murdered by a serial killer in a corn field. There was absolutely no wifi. I've never left a Welcome Center in such a hurry.

Reminder that we subsidise production of Biofuel from corn, which is WORSE than just burning oil

> The research, which was funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy, found that ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion.

This is how you get people skeptics of net zero

It's not that simple. The corn is fed to animals afterwards, so unlike gasoline the industrial waste from biofuels is further used to feed us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains

Any solution to climate change needs to be, at a minimum, 4x more carbon efficient than gasoline.

There is no point in splitting hair - if you find yourself even having a debate about which is worse, it is already a failure.

Gotta feed that corn agro lobby. Lobbying really is a cancer on this republic.

In 2024, what US land is being changed, in a meaningful way, to grow corn?

I've observed human behavior. Net zero is a fantasy.

No Alaska, or Hawaii.

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