Most people wouldn’t associate agriculture with humor or intrigue, but chances are you haven’t heard these five strange facts.
1. Pigs can run a seven-minute mile.
If you’ve ever been stuck in a pen with an angry sow, you know it’s best to get out of the way. But did you know that the average human runner can cover one mile in seven to 10 minutes? On the flip side, pigs can run a mile in seven minutes. That means your odds of winning a race against a pig may be slimmer than you thought.
2. Bananas are berries. But strawberries are not.
According to botanists, berries are simple fruits that stem from a single flower with a single ovary and typically have several seeds. This includes kiwis, pomegranates, eggplants and even bananas. Strawberries, despite their name, stem from a single flower with more than one ovary, which makes them aggregate fruits along with raspberries and blackberries.
3. The longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds.
Chickens aren’t known for being good flyers. While they can fly short distances, it’s unlikely to see one soaring above the treetops. Therefore, it should be no surprise that the longest recorded flight by a chicken is just 13 seconds. Even more interestingly, the longest recorded distance a chicken has flown is 301.5 feet.
4. It takes one hive of bees 55,000 miles of flight to produce one pound of honey.
That’s the equivalent of traveling around the full length of the equator twice. That’s an incredible amount of flight time to produce such a small amount of honey. In those miles, it takes approximately 2 million flowers for bees to produce that one pound of honey. Fortunately, bees can fly about 15 miles per hour, which allows them to go from flower to flower in a relatively short time.
5. It takes two years for one pineapple to grow.
Pineapples may seem easy to come by when the grocery stores are stocked. But the process from field to plate is much longer than you might expect. It takes between 18 and 36 months from the time they are planted for pineapple plants to yield fruit that you can harvest and consume.
