How many are in a hectare?

Today we look at an interesting unit of surface area. It's the HECTARE (not hect-acre), a unit employed when measuring property or large expanses of land.

Hectares came up in an article about the founders of clothing companies North Face, Esprit and Patagonia. The Tompkins sold their businesses and put more than $150 million US dollars into the Conservation Land Trust, dedicated to saving wilderness regions of the world.

Two images of  areas they have purchased. If you click here, you can visit their website.

Now back to the hectare issue. The article I read said the trust owned more than 830,000 hectares of land. That sounds like a lot, but I couldn't envision the size of the hectare, and thus couldn't visualize how large these plots of land might be.

Let's see if our elementary math skills can help. If we search on hectare we find this image on Wikipedia:

It suggests that a hectare is 10,000 square meters, or an area 100 meters by 100 meters. Notice that a hectare does not have to be square; it can be any shape as long as the shape contains 10,000 sq meters.

The same rules apply to an acre, which is an area of 43,560 square feet. An acre was originally specified as 660 ft  (a furlong) x 66 ft (a chain) but it means an area of any shape containing the right square footage. 

Americans tend to use acres for land measurement while most of the rest of the world use hectares. An acre is .4 hectare, so 2.5 acres make one hectare.

Now we can convert the 830,000 hectares. 

2.5 x 830,000 = 2,075,000 or about 2 million acres. Multiply by .00386 to get 3,204 square miles.

How big is that? you say. Here's the last part of a list of countries of the world, ranked by land area. The following countries are all SMALLER THAN the area owned by the Conservation Land Trust:

161	Brunei	2,227.81
162	Trinidad and Tobago	1,979.93
163	Cape Verde	1,557.15
164	Samoa	1,136.68
165	Luxembourg	998.46
166	Comoros	837.84
167	Mauritius	787.65
168	Sao Tome and Principe	386.49
169	Kiribati	313.13
170	Dominica	291.12
171	Tonga	288.80
172	Micronesia	271.04
173	Singapore	267.57
174	Bahrain	256.76
175	Saint Lucia	237.84
176	Andorra	180.70
177	Palau	176.83
178	Seychelles	175.68
179	Antigua and Barbuda	171.04
180	Barbados	166.41
181	St. Vincent and the Grenadines	150.19
182	Grenada	132.82
183	Malta	122.01
184	Maldives	115.83
185	Saint Kitts and Nevis	100.77
186	Marshall Islands	69.88
187	Liechtenstein	61.78
188	San Marino	23.55
189	Tuvalu	10.04
190	Nauru	8.11
191	Monaco	0.77
192	Vatican City	0.44

The US states of Delaware and Rhode Island and the District of Columbia are SMALLER THAN the area owned by the Conservation Land Trust.

Puerto Rico is just slightly larger than the Conservation Land Trust's holdings.