Midterm
The Sunflower Study
For my midterm project, I looked at statistics and datasets revolving around sunflowers. Some questions I had were: Where do they grow best in the United States? How many are typically harvested across the US? Is this number a lot compared to another crop?
I started off by separating the data by state, year and value using a pivot table. The value is Acres Harvested across the state. Alabama in 1997 harvested a total of 10 acres of sunflowers. The data is from every 5 years from 1997 to 2017 (97',02',07',12',17'). Separating the years made it easier to see if there was a big increase or decrease in harvesting. Looking at the data in a table allowed me to formulate even more questions like “why did mass only grow 3 sunflowers in 2002?”
Some questions we cant answer using this data is “what is the number of sunflowers that got planted?” How many crops are planted in an acre? I know what an acre looks like so from this dataset, I get a sense of how much land these sunflowers take-up across the states.
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In order to answer other questions, I got a data set for the production of sunflowers measured in ILBs.
Conditional formatting helped me see that the darker yellow cells had a higher number of sunflowers produced. The state with the highest number produced is North Dakota, then South Dakota, Kansas, and Minnesota.
I went to comparing the lbs produced of sunflowers to another crop. I wanted to compare it to another crop that was measured in-lbs (not bushels or bales) and something that is also a field crop. I decided to look at Peanuts from 1997 to 2017. With peanuts, not every state produces them.
There are 6 states that produce the majority of peanuts we consume in the United States. The top state is Georgia, then Texas, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Peanuts are something we consume in our food, at fairs, or just a snack. Comparing it to something like sunflowers that are not edible, but parts of it can be edible, felt a little off. But it allowed me to see how much more of them are produced and just how little sunflowers are produced in comparison.
