How much land do we use in goods and services that we purchase, consume, or are used on our behalf?
We're going to adopt the allotment as a nice friendly unit of area. Allotments are typically, since Anglo-Saxon times, 10 square rods, which is very close to 250 m².
(thanks to Mike Smith for this idea)
I actually measured an allotment in Sheffield (near my house). They've shrunk a bit: I measured one at roughly 18.2 m by 6.3 m, which is 115 m², close enough to 5 square rods that I suspect it's simply a half plot. Throughout this work though, I'm going to use the convention of an allotment being 250 m² or 10 square rods.
The square rod, rod², relates to other units of area as follows:
| area | converts to | notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25 m² | 1 rod² | approx | |
| 10 rod² | 1 allotment | 250 m² | convention adopted here |
| 160 rod² | 1 acre | 16 allot | traditional |
| 400 rod² | 1 hectare | 40 allot | approx |
| 40000 rod² | 1 km² | 4000 allot | approx |
So here's a fun fact.
The land area of UK is around 1 billion allotments (970 million allotments, which is only 3% off).
If we divide the land of the UK into equal sized parcels so that each person resident in the UK gets one parcel, then the parcels are about 15 allotments in size. So we each get 15 allotments or 150 square rods.
Our consumption requires land. We need land to grow food (such as apples); we need land to house animals and to grow their food; we need land for various useful services, such as housing, power plants, transport infrastructure.
It will turn out that the amount of land we each require for various foods or services will be somewhere between a fraction of an allotment and several allotments (per year). It's worth referring to the chart, and remember the fact that 10 square rods make an allotment.
For example, the oats for my daily porridge need about 1 square rod of land to grow. Which is one tenth of an alloment. Since we have 150 square rods, it doesn't seem too dire, in this case, to use 1 of those for my breakfast.
[AUK2015] "Agriculture in the United Kingdom, 2015"; 2016-05-26.
[nsalg]: http://www.nsalg.org.uk/allotment-info/ on 2016-05-12