I’m thinking about the meat industry for example. Sure, there are a lot of farmers, sure they have a lot of animals on each farm, but to me it seems people consume meat at a higher pace than an animal has time to grow to be an adult before it is made food.
Same I am wondering for bananas. It takes some time for it to grow, and if millions are a regular consumers, how can we still have so much available?
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Even the biggest average beef consumers (Argentina) consumes around 50kg of beef per year per person. The average global meat (all kinds) consumption is about 50kg per person per year.
A beef cow takes less than 18 months to grow (typically). The population of beef cattle is around 1 billion. An average beef cow provides around 200kg of meat. Chickens only take 6-8 weeks to grow and provide 1-1.5 kg of meat per bird and there are more than 30 billion of them farmed. These are certainly big numbers.
A banana farm produces around 100 tons per year per hectare. A farm produces more bananas in one hectare in one year than a single human would eat their entire life. Humans consume about 100 million tons a year – so this is a nice round number of 1 million hectares of banana plantation (average). Although it is hard to picture, the US, China and India have EACH more than 100 million hectares worth of farmland. The total cropland used in the world (not counting grazing for cattle etc) is 1.5 BILLION hectares. Bananas are not even 0.1 percent of this number.
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