OK, I’ll admit it’s a stupid question, I mean, we’re not aliens in Kansas! A better question might be, “If people living in Kansas could only eat food grown sustainably in Kansas what would they eat?”
When I was interviewing Dr Rhonda R Janke about sustainable agriculture a few weeks back she sent me an interesting slide presentation called The Future of Food in Kansas. Here are 5 things I learned.
- One Kansas farmer feeds more than 128 people.
- In 2007 Kansas farmers grew enough wheat to feed the population of Kansas for 43 years. So, we’d not have to give up our daily bread!
- In 2007 Kansas farmers raised enough beef to feed Kansans for 17 years. We’d not be stuck for a burger either.
- Kansas has 473 vegetable farms. Oh, oh, this isn’t sounding like we’d have to eat our veggies. We’d have enough sweetcorn for 52 days, asparagus for 17 days, tomatoes for 5 days, and less than 1 day worth of carrots and lettuce. Not good!
- Mmmm, we’d have blackberries for 98 days, but only 15 days of peaches and 10 days of apples.
Do you wonder what would be on your dinner table if everyone in your state had to eat from food currently being produced on farms within your state? I think it’s a good question. Do you know the answer?
Sunflower Blues photo is by longhorndave and is reproduced here from Flickr under a creative commons license. Thanks Dave – great photo!
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That’s an interesting idea, even though it’s also a little scary. I’m not sure what we’d be eating up here in MN–some corn, some beef, locally some buffalo, but really… I have no idea what our main crops are. Soybeans?
Weird.
Ruralmama, “yes” I found it very interesting too. It’s something I’d wondered about but not researched. I’m going to be writing about this again in the future for sure.
i agree with them.Im researching kansas because im doing a project about my fav state so i picked kansas