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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

Unless there’s some funny unit issue going on (I know there are short and long tons…), it looks like Germany consumed around 5000KT of potatoes in 2022.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/potato-co...

> A farm in Saxony has been left with 4,000 tons of potatoes in what Berliner Morgenpost is calling “a story about the absurdities of our food system”.

I dunno; it doesn’t seem too absurd, better to have too many than too few potatoes.

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I'm having hard time to visualize it, can you convert them in adult elephants and TV Tower height? Bear in mind I only saw asian elephants in zoo.

A ton is a big bag (yes, they get delivered in bags and that’s the name for them), which is pretty exactly a cubic meter. 4000 tons is hence a 2x2meter tower, 1km high. Or 20mx20m, 10m high.not sure how high you can stack TV towers or Asian elephants. The conversion is left as an exercise to the reader.

> which is pretty exactly a cubic meter

That would be if we were talking about water (and at 4ºC if we want to be "exact"), but potatoes have a different density and cannot fill the space entirely due to their irregular shapes. Are you saying that those two things cancel themselves out and the result is that 1 cubic meter of potatoes is "exactly" 1 tone?

Pretty much. See the FAQ here https://4000-tonnen.de/faq.html

> Wie werden die Kartoffeln geliefert? Die Kartoffeln werden per LKW direkt an Ihre angegebene Adresse geliefert. Die Lieferung erfolgt in einem Big Bag, in das ca. 1000 Kilogramm Kartoffeln passen.

Standard Big bags are roughly 1x1x1m

They are not as volumetrically efficient, but it's probably not too far from the approximation plus 10-15% I think. Potatoes are mostly water.

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