[Pick]

The following statistics from the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (for the year 2007) will give you a sense of the
size of these two vastly different industries.

Field Corn
93.6 million planted acres•
13.1 billion bushels produced •
(366 million tons)
Crop Value: $52.3 billion•
Sweet Corn
631,400 planted acres•
2.9 million tons fresh and •
processed
Crop Value: $625.5 million •
fresh; $236.9 million processed

What do some of these words mean? A bushel of corn is 56 pounds, about the weight of a large bag of dog
food. An acre is about the area of a football field. A ton is 2,000 pounds, about the weight of a small car.


47% of field corn produced in the United States (6.15 billion
bushels*) is as feed for livestock such as beef, pork or poultry.


24% (3.1 billion bushels) is used for ethanol production. Besides
the ethanol this produces, this corn also will result in approximately 24
million metric tons of high-protein livestock feed in various forms and
about 2.5 million pounds of corn oil.


19% (2.5 billion bushels) is exported to other countries. The top five
countries to which the United States exports corn are Japan, Mexico,
South Korea, Taiwan and Egypt.


10% of the corn (1.4 billion bushels) goes to other food, seed and
industrial uses. Field corn is a source of corn cereal, corn starch, corn oil
and corn syrup. Hundreds of other products are also derived from corn,
such as certain plastic packaging and even fabrics.


In addition, about 9% of the total corn supply (currently 1.3 billion
bushels) is carried over as a surplus for the next year.


Looks like we are in no danger of running out of corn. This year.