How Many Square Metres Of A Field Are Required To Make A Loaf Of Bread?

How many square metres of a field of wheat are required to make a loaf of bread?

Many variables, including yield per hectare, variety of wheat grown, flour yield, type of bread, recipe quantities
etc, have to be taken into account when trying to come up with an answer to this one and there will, necessarily, be a spread of values around the mean.

Using typical UK values for the main variables I have estimated the following:

An average yield for wheat in the UK is about eight tonnes, or 8,000kg per hectare. Taking a flour yield of 80 per cent (conservative) and a bread to flour ratio of 2.75:1 (remember that bread is much more moist than flour and
is therefore much heavier) the resultant bread yield per hectare is 17,600kg. In “old money” the standard loaf was 2lb which equals 0.9kg. This means we get some 19,500 loaves per hectare or, two loaves per square metre.

In the great wheat-growing plains of the US, Canada and Australia, yields are much lower and typically 2-4 tonnes per hectare as production is much less intensive; consequently you would need one to two square metres to provide the wheat for your loaf. By comparison, the better wheat growers in the UK frequently exceed ten tonnes per hectare.

We used to import a lot of hard wheat from the US and Canada for our bread-making but since the general adoption of the Chorleywood bread-making process, much more home-grown wheat can now be used.

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