Big Planet, Little Land

The planet Earth is very large, but there’s really not that much space on it for farming, which means it’s important to protect the soil on the farmland. You can demonstrate how very little farmland there is by cutting up an apple for the class. The apple represents the planet Earth.

1. Cut the apple into quarters; there of those are oceans.
2. Slice the remaining quarter in half; one piece is all of the land people cannot live on, such as swamps, mountaintops, polar ice cap, and deserts. What’s left now? One-eighth of the apple.
3. Slice this piece into four equal sections. Three of them represent the land that is too rocky, too wet, too cold, or too steep. It also includes land with soil that is too poor to grow food on and all the land that has been built on or paved. What’s left now? One-thirty-second of the planet.
4. Carefully peel the tiny slice of Earth. This bit of peel represents the very thin layer of the Earth’s crust that grows all the food to feed every-one on the planet. This layer, called the topsoil, is less than five feet deep and it takes 100 years for nature to create one inch of it.

This visual example usually sparks some lively class discussion. Did you have any idea that people had such little space for farming? How can people protect the soil? Can the students practice cutting an apple (or drawing an apple and then drawing lines through it to represent the cut) and telling the story to someone else?