One Billion...

Us humans have trouble comprehending a billion of anything and hearing that we could win a billion dollars in the lottery sounds pretty cool.  So what would a billion of something look like?  I don't have a billion dollars to show you but I do have LOTS of seed wheat.

 

Seed wheat comes in many different varieties and each variety's seed is a little different in size.  Farmers like to look at this size difference in terms of seed per pound.  The variety that I am going to use in my example is Winter Hawk.  Winter Hawk has approximately 18,000 seeds per pound.  18,000 seeds per pound times 60 pounds in a bushel gets us 1,080,000 seeds per bushel.  On our farm we have a 1964 Chevy tandem axle truck that can hold approximately 500 bushels of wheat.

500 bushels of wheat times 1,080,000 seeds equals 540,000,000.  So a couple truck loads of seed wheat is a over a billion kernels of wheat.  Being by this truck has more visual impact than just seeing pictures but now when I think about a billion of anything I think about it terms of 1964 Tandems.  So when I heard the lottery could be up to 1.5 billion dollars I thought of three trucks of wheat.

-Seed Wheat Billionaire Ryan

P.S. - Every time I wrote the word billion in this post I heard Dr. Evil from Austin Powers in my head.