Road Trip! Things turned chilly in East Tennessee this week, so I decided to make an impromptu trip to Central Florida, Lake Buena Vista, Disney World Resort to be exact…

No, really I’m down here to speak at the Farm Roads to Urban Intersections workshop with the Agriculture Institute of Florida. This is a great workshop series focusing on social media use in Agriculture. I will be giving tools and tips for blogging to a diverse group of farmers and agriculture professionals in attendance. It should be a great trip!

As I do every time I travel to a different state, I look ahead to the diversity in Agriculture for the region. Here’s some great Agriculture facts for Florida!

• If all the boxes of Florida tomatoes shipped in a crop year were laid end to end, they would stretch from Pensacola round-trip to Beijing, China – over 58 million boxes!
• All the potatoes produced in Florida in a crop year could sink a battleship – 9,112,000 cwt
• Florida farmers grow enough sweet corn for all 18,000,000 people in Florida to have an ear weekly – 1 billion ears of sweet corn
• Horticulture products are the highest agricultural cash crop in Florida
• Florida leads the nation in production of oranges
• Pierson, FL is known as the Fern Capitol of the World

2011 Florida Agriculture Statistics

• Number of farms – 47,500
• Acres of farm land – 9,250,000
• Average farm size in acres – 195
• Number of cattle and calves – 1,710,000
• Number of hogs and pigs – 16,000
• Number of milk cows – 119,000
• Pounds of milk produced – 2,269,000,000
• Pounds of peanuts harvested - 549,500,000
• Bales of cotton – 183,000
• Tons of sugarcane grown - 14,865,000

Click here for more statistics on Florida agriculture from the USDA.

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