Barn Owl Activity

Today in class, we broke off into small groups and were presented with a math problem. We had to figure out how many acres of grain were needed to feed a two kilogram barn owl. In order to solve the problem, we had to find how many fowls a barn owl eats per year, how much grain a fowl eats a year, and then how many acres were needed to produce that amount of grain in order to come up with an answer. First, my group and I discovered that a two kilogram barn owl eats approximately three fowls per night. When then discovered that fowl eat approximately 4.7 grams of gain each day or 0.0047 kg. After this, we learned that approximately 50 kg of grain can be grown on an acre each year. To figure out how many acres it would take to produce the amount of grain needed, we multiplied the 0.0047 kg of grain a fowl eat a night by three to display the three fowls barn owls eat per night. We then multiplied this by 365 to represent the number of days in a year to get 5.1 kg of grain per 2 kg barn owl per year. We then divided that number by the 50 kg of grain grown per acre per year to find the percentage of an acre needed to produce that amount of grain. We got an answer of 1/10th of an acre or 10%.