Farmers on every continent except Antarctica grow wheat. Roughly how many tonnes are harvested worldwide in a year?
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Answer
About 800 million tonnes
Bread wheat has a huge genome, about five times larger than the human one, because it carries the merged DNA of three ancestral grasses.
How to estimate it
Wheat supplies about a fifth of humanity's calories: 500 of 2,500 kcal per day. At 3,400 kcal per kg that is 150 g a day, or 55 kg a year per person. For 8 billion people: 8 billion × 55 kg = 440 million tonnes. Animal feed, seed and losses add about half again: 440 × 1.5 = 660 million tonnes. The actual harvest is about 800 million tonnes.
Source: FAO (FAOSTAT)
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