Following the 1998 production season, the American Crystal Sugar Company came up with some fascinating facts regarding the 10.7-million-ton sugar beet crop harvested by growers of the Moorhead, Minn.-based cooperative. Among them:

Those 10.7 million tons translated into 10.8 billion individual sugar beets. If stacked atop each other, the resulting beet pile would reach to the moon and back - three times.

At the peak of harvest, capacity existed for the delivery of 2,500 truckloads per hour (42 per minute) to the company's piling sites.

Were all the truckloads delivered during the 1998 American Crystal harvest lined up bumper to bumper, the line would stretch from Moorhead to Honolulu - a distance of 3,835 miles (not counting whitecaps on the Pacific).

The number of miles traveled while hauling American Crystal sugar beets from fields to piling sites in 1998 totaled 8.9 million. The equivalent of more than 358 trips around the world, the massive undertaking required approximately 1.8 million gallons of fuel.

It's fun to muse upon such comparisons; but even more important, these examples help illustrate the sheer magnitude and influence of agriculture in our region. The number of acres required to grow a given volume of an agricultural commodity - and the inputs needed to produce the bounty from all those acres - are indeed impressive; and their ramifications reach far beyond the fields where these crops are planted, nurtured and harvested.

Let's use the 1998 North Dakota wheat crop for another example.

Nearly 311 million bushels of wheat (spring, winter and durum combined) were harvested in the Peace Garden State in 1998. Those 311 million bushels came from slightly more than 9.6 million acres. That's the equivalent of 15,000 square miles - greater than the combined surfaces of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, and more than twice the size of Minnesota's largest county, St. Louis, at whose southeastern tip lies the city of Duluth.

Last year's average North Dakota wheat yield ran 32.3 bushels per acre (the highest since 1992). With wheat weighing about 60 pounds per bushel, we're thus looking at 18.7 billion pounds of wheat being produced in North Dakota during 1998. That's 72 pounds for every man, woman and child in the United States - or, put another way, three-plus pounds of wheat for every person on our planet.

While a significant percentage of the '98 North Dakota wheat crop went into on-farm or commercial storage, let's assume - for purposes of this article, though it's economically illogical and logistically impossible - that all the state's wheat moved into the marketplace simultaneously. What transportation capabilities would such movement entail?

Were the entire 311 million bushels to be shipped out by truck in one huge convoy, it would require about 365,900 semitrailers (assuming an average load of 850 bushels) - and the patience of Job for anyone unfortunate enough to be following the convoy down the highway.

It would take a unit train totaling 91,470 hopper cars to move the same volume of wheat, given an average load of 3,400 bushels. That magical train would stretch a distance of 1,126 miles, or roughly the distance from Fargo, N.D., to Pittsburgh, Pa. (Now, you tell me how many locomotives would be required!)

Were the entire 1998 North Dakota wheat crop to be shipped out of Duluth- Superior, it would require 311 "salties," each carrying an average load of one million bushels. Such a volume of grain would, by the way, fill the Twin Ports' entire storage capacity (elevators and flat facilities combined) more than four times over.

Do these statistics open your eyes a bit wider? Impressive, aren't they? But now let's add in the 1998 wheat production from Minnesota and South Dakota and then recalculate:

Harvested wheat acreage in the two Dakotas and Minnesota during 1998 was nearly 14.9 million. That equates to 23,260 square miles - slightly less than the area covered by the state of West Virginia - and more than three times the area of Minnesota's St. Louis County.

Total wheat production from this tri-state area in 1998 was more than 512 million bushels. That's 123 pounds of wheat per resident of the United States. To move that volume would require more than 600,000 semis or 150,600 standard hopper rail cars. And at 25,000 metric tons per vessel, it would take about 512 "salties" or lakers to move that wheat out of Duluth- Superior and through the Great Lakes.

It's all pretty spectacular, isn't it? And we haven't even begun to tack on the other major Upper Midwest ag commodities like barley, corn, soybeans, sunflower seed and edible beans. Lump them all together with wheat, and couple that with our livestock production - which we haven't even touched upon here - and you come out with some numbers that profoundly underscore the assertion that this region truly is a breadbasket for the world.

Now, America, aren't you glad Thomas Jefferson pulled off that Louisiana Purchase nearly two centuries ago?

Ag writer Don Lilleboe hails from West Fargo, N.D.