How Many Potatoes Are We Going To Get?

Problem:
We planted loads of potatoes at the community farm. How many potatoes are there going to be per family?

What we know:

• There are 20 beds of potatoes with two rows in each bed
• Each bed is about 125 metres long
• The potatoes where dropped by the planter around  35 centimetres apart

Solution:
How much was planted?

• There are 40 rows in total, each 125 metres long
• 40 x 125m = 5000m
• since there is 1000m in a km, we planted 5km of potatoes.

• the distance between potatoes is .35 metres
• 5000m ÷ .35 = 14285
• therefore we planted about 14285 seed potatoes.

Expected crop:
We looked it up and we found the average is 10 potatoes for every seed potato you plant, that means if we plant 14285 seed potatoes then we could expect a crop of 142850 potatoes.

In a book, my dad found that for every metre of seed potatoes you plant you get a crop of 2.5 kg of potatoes.

• 5000m x 2.5kg per metre = 12500kg of potatoes

How many per household:
At the moment there are 50 households but we hope that by harvest time we will have 75 households.

• 12500kg ÷ 75 = 166kg of potatoes
• 142850 ÷ 75 = 1905 potatoes

Conclusion:
If everything works out as we hope, each houshold will get about 1900 potatoes which should weigh about 166kg.

Planting Potatoes At The Farm On The Eco-village Land

I went to the farm on the eco-village land to plant potatoes. My job was to walk along behind and make sure that all of the potatoes got covered in soil because they sometimes don't. We planted at least 6 long beds the length of the field I was very tired!!!

 Suzanne and Mary sat on the back and filled the planter, while Pat drove the tractor