perverse to what you may conceive ( and what your solid food labels may intimate ) corn is not the most grown crop in America . The most grown harvest is something no one is consume , no one is asking for , and no one is quite certain what to do with . It ’s your lawn .
Top image : Satellite imaging of crops growing in Kansas /NASA Earth Observatory .
The U.S. commit a fullone - fifth of its country to agriculture ( 408 million Akka , or 637,500 square miles ) for farmers to grow on , of which corn is the big food crop . However , there arealmost 50,000 straight milesof lawn growing in the U.S.—almost three multiplication as much as clavus .
So how does the country with the most plowland on the major planet terminate up with a turn one harvest that ’s purely decorative ? It ’s down to two things : Scale and a strange twist of technological history .
The History of the Lawn
Today , lawn are merely what you utilise to fill up an empty patch of dirt . They are the affair so coarse , so known , that the heart does n’t even inconvenience oneself to halt and take them in , except in their absence . But that was n’t always the cause .
The very first lawn care instruction manual dates back to the13th century save by Italian horticultural partizan , Pietro de Crescenzi . Just like lawn enthusiasts today , de Crescenzi had his own unequaled idea of how to decent care for a lawn , though his favorite two practices — of first preparing the ground by underprice boil piddle all over it and then limiting mowing to twice a yr — bomb to make it into the all-inclusive favor .
It was n’t until about 400 long time later , though , that lawns as we fuck them began to be seen commonly , and even then they were mostly the province of the super - rich . The lawn was a symbol of that wealth , of trend — of the kind of household that could give to call on large tracts of soil over to the cultivation of something fundamentally useless . But it was also considered something of a technological , perhaps even artistic , wonder . To realise just how much of one those former lawns were , you have to put yourself , briefly , in a dyad of 17th - century shoes .
Image : A house painting of Versailles — and its famous lawn and border garden in 1668 , Pierre Patel /Chateau Versailles .
Grass , when it was cut at all , was cut using hand tools ( hence de Crescenzi ’s early suggestion of a double yearly mowing schedule ) . These were perfectly serviceable , but not particularly tasteful and certainly not anything even approach manicured . To come across a well - kept lawn — unripe , neatly - adjoin , hewn down to a dead uniform tiptop by an USA of servant , and laid out tidily like some kind of outdoor carpet — was a form of daze to the senses . It was something sensational , something a little uncanny , something deeply intimate turn unusual .
What at last change that was the invention of the lawnmower by English engine driver Edwin Budding in 1830 , who tookthe idea from the weaving machines he saw in the cloth mills . Suddenly , what could once only be accomplished by a staff of dozens of gardener compulsively wielding a set of scythes , clippers and hoes , could now be done in an afternoon by one only vaguely attentive somebody . With Labour Party no longer such a limiting factor , lawn started to appear more and more frequently in cities , which could now yield to throw down lawn in public spaces .
range of a function : Vintage lawnmower advertizing , 1954 / Simplicity .
By the get-go of the 1900s , that early push - lawn mower had been supersede by the gas - lawn mower and was being marketed to item-by-item householder , who were also rapidly acquiring lawns of their own . Within a century , lawn had gone from the high - luxury market to just the affair that filled the vacuous space around us .
Corn Vs. Grass: The Grudge Match
Okay , the lawn has become pretty hard to escape , it ’s true . But corn is also one problematical agricultural rival to conflict with . America growsmore corn than any other countryin the world and it is the subject of our most intense agricultural fascination , inquiry , and examination . It ’s ourtop agricultural crop and is grown acrossmore than 400,000 U.S. farms , most of them dedicate chiefly to maize . So how did the lawn grapple to not just edge out corn , but trounce it three metre over , all while just meriting more than a passing coup d’oeil from most farmers ? fundamentally , the triumph of lawns is a triumph of shell .
Most patch of lawn are modest enough that , unlike farm , you ca n’t utilize orbiter information to tally it up , which means that for a long meter researchers did n’t even get it on how to get an accurate count of how much lawn we were get . Finally , researcher Cristina Milesi came up with a project through NASA ’s Earth Observatoryusing a combination of orbiter data , aerial photographs , a measure of the total paved areas in the U.S. , and a new - derived mathematical formula to total up with this map of lawns around the country :
simulacrum : lawn across the U.S. / Milesi via NASA Earth observatory .
It does n’t look like much , distribute out across the country like that , but together it sum up to128,000 square kilometers ( or about 50,000 square nautical mile ) of growing , three times that of the U.S. demesne occupied by corn .
It turned out that while corn whiskey was busily winning the farm , lawns were gain the abode . clavus may be the apex predator of the farm , but lawn are our housecats : small , tidy , exceptionally demanding , and everywhere . In the end , lawn did n’t need the farm to survive — instead they just made Farmer of us all .
farmsgrass
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