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Comment by grainstats | Hacker News Reader

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

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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?

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