Re: Measurement units used in USA

On Wed, 12 Nov 2003 16:15:44 +0100, "fb" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>For the "translation" of an agricultural program from Dutch/English to
>American I am looking for units used by American farmers.
>
>- How do they measure length / width of a field (in yards or feet)?

Feet, or rods.  More rarely chains. though they are more useful in
calculating acres and many farmers have a measuring wheel with a
circumference of 0.1 chain (multiply turns of the wheel for a
rectangular field, divide by 1000 to get acres).  Measuring devices,
those wheels and tapes, almost never in rods or yards, just feet or
meters or chains.  Sometimes decimal feet rather than feet and inches
(decimal feet are common for surveyors and for civil engineers, and
are often used in measuring dimensions of grain bins).  Never yards,
they are only used on the golf course and the football field, and in
cubic yards for concrete or gravel.  Most Americans aren't quite sure
how many feet there are in a yard, though if pushed to guess, most of
them would get it right.

>- How do they measure the area (size)? In acre with decimals?

Tenths of an acre.

>- How do they measure Yield?

Bushels per acre, usually.  Pounds per acre or short hundredweight per
acre for some commodities.   Local variations include short tons per
acre in parts of Montana and maybe a few other places.

Of course, those bushels are units of mass, which vary depending on
the commodity being measured.  Usually the same in Canada and the
United States, even though as units of volume the Canadian bushel is
3.2% larger.  Except for oats, 32 lb (14.515 kg) in the U.S. and 34 lb
(15.422 kg) in Canada.

Total production in the United States, or in one state, or another
country or region, either millions of bushels or tons, and those tons
are almost always metric tons even if not identified as such.   

Market prices in dollars and cents and quarters or eighths of a cent
per bushel of mass, proving that even with dollars the traders are a
couple of centuries behind the times.  The stock market figured out
decimal dollars EARLY in the 21st century; someday the bond markets
and commodity markets might follow suit:

  But if it be thought that, either now, or at any future time, the 
  citizens of the United States may be induced to undertake a thorough
  reformation of their whole system of measures, weights and coins, 
  reducing every branch to the same decimal ratio already established 
  in their coins, and thus bringing the calculation of the principal 
  affairs of life within the arithmetic of every man who can multiply 
  and divide plain numbers, greater changes will be necessary.
             U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, 1790

>- How do they measure applied products (in fluid/dry ounces per acre)?

For chemical pesticides, etc., pints per acre (with decimal
fractions), or ounces per acre--and they are often damn sloppy about
whether those are ounces avoirdupois or U.S. fluid ounces.  Make sure
you identify them. It's easy for you to figure out which to use; just
convert milliliters to fluid ounces, grams to avoirdupois ounces.  But
if you are writing it for Canada too, remember that they use imperial
fluid ounces, which are different.  Maybe sometimes milliliters per
acre or grams per acre.

U.S. liquid gallons per acre for the chemicals after they are in
solution.

Pounds per acre for nitrogen and granular herbicides and the like.

Test weight (bulk density) as a measure of quality in pounds per U.S.
bushel, in both the U.S. and Canada.  Measured by weighing a U.S. dry
pint of grain (usually on a scale which uses grams if you just get the
weight).

But 1000 kernel weight in grams, something more often used as a
measure of quality by the scientists than in the marketplace.

You still sometimes hear seeding rates given in bushels and pecks per
acre, though decimal bushels or pounds are more common.  

Similarly, when grain is sold many elevators used to use bushel and
pounds, but now it is bushels and decimal or common fractions of a
bushel (usually hundredths of a bushel).

Cattle prices in dollars per short hundredweight (or the equivalent
cents per pound).  Strangely, in Canada (at least in Saskatchewan),
while hogs are sold in the auction markets in Canadian dollars per
hundred kilograms, cattle are sold in the same markets in Canadian
dollars per hundred pounds.

Medication rates for livestock in milliliters per hundred pounds or
per animal in some size range.

>Are there any other US units that are different from the metric (SI) units?

Temperature in degrees Flintstone--though even when I was a kid, the
temperature scale on the moisture tester at the local grain elevator
used degrees Celsius for its temperature correction, with a circular
slide rule for doing the calculations.

Strength of chemicals in pounds of active ingredient per U.S. gallon.

Fuel consumption in U.S. gallons (with decimal fractions) per hour or
per acre.

Pounds per cubic foot for dry fertilizer bulk density.

Pressure in lbf/in².

Electric fence chargers in joules, the SI units.

Air flow rate in drying bins in cubic feet per minute.

>Please reply to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>Thanks.

Note also that professional journals in the United States often use
metric units such as Mg/ha for yield and infestation rates in
grasshoppers per square meter.  In the popular literature, you will
see things like insect or weed concentrations either per square meter
or per square yard (or less often, per square foot).  It is becoming
less common to convert the metric units used by the scientists.

-- 
Gene Nygaard

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