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I pulled out some of my WWI ration notes and decided to check it against the potatoes. The 19,000 acres produced 9,306,000 cwt according to USDA records. They use the short hundredweight of 100 pounds, not the 112 pound long hundredweight, so it's a straight 93,060,000 pounds of potatoes.
The WW1 potato ration for a US soldier in garrison was 20 ounces per day. The potato harvest is enough to supply 20 ounces of potatoes per day to 203,967 people for a year, assuming 100% utilization (no waste and no substitutes). However, that would have to cover both military and civilian use. Since Nebraska's population is slightly under 2 million, there would need to be a roughly 90% casualty rate for Nebraska to be able to feed its own civilians that sort of potato ration, and that assumes production remained constant with 1/10 the population and there still wouldn't be a surplus for military use (and the other three states would still have no potatoes at all).
Substitutes will stretch that - the peas add 10,126 person-years to the ~200k for the potatoes, but we're still covering an area with a current population of around 13 million. Corn, on the other hand, is massively overgrown (because large portions of it are for ethanol). Nebraska produces about 1.79 billion bushels of grain corn (they also grow close to 5 million tons of silage corn, but I'm not touching that because I don't want to get into animal feed). A bushel is 56 pounds, but only 36% of that is edible weight for humans. A ration of canned corn is 12 ounces. Put all of that together, and Nebraska alone produces close to 131,500,000 person-years of corn in a year. Corn is relatively light in vitamins and minerals for its caloric content, though, so there will be enough food from an energy perspective but poor nutrition through the area. It'll be a heavily meat-and-maize diet.
The WW1 potato ration for a US soldier in garrison was 20 ounces per day. The potato harvest is enough to supply 20 ounces of potatoes per day to 203,967 people for a year, assuming 100% utilization (no waste and no substitutes). However, that would have to cover both military and civilian use. Since Nebraska's population is slightly under 2 million, there would need to be a roughly 90% casualty rate for Nebraska to be able to feed its own civilians that sort of potato ration, and that assumes production remained constant with 1/10 the population and there still wouldn't be a surplus for military use (and the other three states would still have no potatoes at all).
Substitutes will stretch that - the peas add 10,126 person-years to the ~200k for the potatoes, but we're still covering an area with a current population of around 13 million. Corn, on the other hand, is massively overgrown (because large portions of it are for ethanol). Nebraska produces about 1.79 billion bushels of grain corn (they also grow close to 5 million tons of silage corn, but I'm not touching that because I don't want to get into animal feed). A bushel is 56 pounds, but only 36% of that is edible weight for humans. A ration of canned corn is 12 ounces. Put all of that together, and Nebraska alone produces close to 131,500,000 person-years of corn in a year. Corn is relatively light in vitamins and minerals for its caloric content, though, so there will be enough food from an energy perspective but poor nutrition through the area. It'll be a heavily meat-and-maize diet.
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