Are you wondering how big an acre is? Perhaps you’re planning to visit a national park, and its land has been measured in acres? If so, you’ll likely have questions such as, how big is an acre visual, or how long will it take to walk an acre? This article will help you to visualize an acre using measurements we are all familiar with, such as the size of an American football field and a tennis court.
How big is an acre?
An acre is a unit that’s used only to measure an area of land; this could be a farm, a filed, or national park. One acre is 43,560 square feet. However, these 43,560 square feet could be any shape. If the acre of land is square, each side will measure 209 feet.
You may be wondering why an acre is 43,560 Square Feet, isn’t that a bit of a random number? Well, here’s the science behind the measurements. If we look back in agricultural history at how the acre came to be, we can find out how the acres measurements were created. The size of an acre is found by multiplying a chain, which is sixty-six feet by a furlong, 660 feet. A furlong is approximately an eighth of a mile.
A chain is a measurement that was created hundreds of years ago by surveyors to measure land. It was basically the length of a piece of chain that the surveyor used to measure land. A furlong was a measurement of land that was used back in the day when oxen plowed the fields. It was the length of land that a team of oxen could plow before they needed to take a rest. One furlong is just over 200 meters.
Furlongs and Chains were combined to create a new way of measuring land, and this became known as the acre. An acre was the size of a field that the average team of oxen could plow in a single day.
What is an acre Visual?
Most people aren’t familiar with how hard oxen can work or how much land they can plow in a day, so it may still be a little tricky to visualize an acre of land. In the metric system, an acre is 4046.86 Square Meters or 0.00404686 square kilometers or 0.0015625 square miles.
If you’re planning to visit a national park and are wondering how long it will take you to walk across a certain number of acres, you’ll be more worried about travel time then measurements. The average hiker has a walking speed of almost four MPH, and at this speed, you’ll be able to cross an acre of land in just over half a minute or 35.61 seconds.
How to Visualize an acre using Athletic Fields
The average size of a farm in the United States is 234 acres, and hobby farms are usually less than 10 acres. It may be easier to visualize the playing field of your favorite sport and then work out how many times it fits into an acre. People often say that an acre is the same size as an American Football field. This isn’t actually true as an acre is about three-quarters of the size of a football field. 0.756 football fieldes will fit inside an acre, or a football field 1.32 acres, whichever way you want to look at it.
As soccer fields are wider than American football fields, a soccer field is almost two acres in measurement. The exact measurement of a soccer field is 1.98 Acres.
If you’re more interested in tennis, then soccer or football, here are the measurements using tennis courts. Fifteen and a half tennis courts can fit inside one acre of land.
An acre is also the size of three lanes of an Olympic swimming pool or one-third of a baseball field.
Fun Facts
Just for fun, here are some other facts to help you visualize the size of an acre. Eighteen average-sized family homes could be built on one acre of land.
And here’s an even funnier fact; if you were to lay 1584 backing potatoes end to end, you would have made a line from one end of an acre to the other. They would stretch 660 feet, which is a furlong or the distance an ox can plow before it needs a break. And, some potato leaves are edible, while some aren’t.
It’s also worth noting that acres aren’t the same the world over. The American acre is smaller than the Irish and Scottish equivalent. In Scotland, an acre is the same size as 1.27 American acres, and in Ireland, its even bigger at 1.6 US acres.