Math by Farming

For anyone who visits this blog (heh heh, ok, I know nobody else visits this site besides us, but let's pretend anyway), they'd know that I'm currently located on a farm doing farm related things. When it comes time for me to talk about things in this blog of ours, I tend to talk about... farming. What else would I talk about, New York?

New York state's population is 19,190,115 total with 17,624,305 of those people living in metro areas as of 2003(USDA/ERS). NY covers 54,475 square miles, which is the 27th largest state in the USA. So, on average, that would be 323.5 people per mile, but that doesn't matter. Main imports are immigrant taxi drivers and gorilla stink spray (Just a guess). The state animal is the beaver. Dinosaur fossils found in New York are from the
Coelophysis, which was considered one of the geeks of the dinosaur carnivores, and was beat up daily for milk money, which explains why they traveled in packs and were able to run away really fast. I guess that's the joke: Once you've saurischian, you've seen them all...

...OF COURSE I'M GOING TO TALK ABOUT FARMING, YOU DOLT!

Now to farming. Also, get your pad, pen, and calculator ready.

We're still harvesting wheat. All of that rain we got a couple weeks ago set us back, and currently we are on a 450 acre sprinkler irrigated crop. 450 acres, what's that? That is 19,602,000 square feet my friend, or 0.703125 square miles (640 acres in a mile), so the radius of this circular field is 2498 feet. To help you relate how big this is: Imagine the state of New York. Ok, now imagine it 1.29x10^-5 of that size. Yeah, that big. Seriously, for those of you who have been on the FHSU campus, imagine that area. The university grounds is about 275 acres big, or 0.430 square miles.

We have been farming on this field for four days now, and we are only 70% done (estimated). Here is where the real mathy stuff comes in, and someone might want to check my numbers, but here we go.
We cut the field with a 30 foot-wide header, but since we don't go to the edge of the header, we really only use an average of about 28 feet of that header. We have 2 combines, so you could say we cut with a 56 foot width. Because this field is irrigated, we have to go really, really slow. Instead of 5.0 mph, we average only around 1.9 mph, or 10,032 feet/hour. So, that means every hour, we harvest 56 * 10032 = 561792 square feet per hour, or 12.9 acres/hour. That means that the whole field will take 450 / 12.9 = 34.9 hours to cut a field. A whole day's work is 13 to 14 hours, but we only cut for 12 hours a day, give or take. So, the whole field can get cut in 3 days.

3 days to cut, but we've been there for four days, and, if we're lucky, only one more day. So what's the problem? For the whole harvest, we have had 6 breakdowns (or 6 unrequested interruptions of combine operations, if you want to get bureaucratic about it), and ALL SIX of those breakdowns were in this field. Irrigated wheat can do that. 4 of those breakdowns were mine, and involved the header in some way, and one of them was sort of my fault, I didn't tighten down two bolts to the required torque. How am I supposed to know how much 120 foot-pounds feel like? Are you still reading this? Or did you just skip to the end, you punk?! In any case, you shall be rewarded (or punished, you cheater) by giving you a link to the everything conversion tool: OnlineConversion.com, or a kick in the head. You'll have to travel to me, and bend your head down, or you can have someone else kick you for me through proxy.

Ugh. I think my brain just died.