Convert Hectare (ha) to Arpent (arpent (area)) instantly.
About these units
Hectare (ha)
A hectare is equal to 10,000 m², or 0.01 km², and is the standard unit of land measurement in agriculture, forestry, and land management across most of the world. Unlike the acre, which comes from historical English land systems, the hectare is fully metric and integrates cleanly into scientific practice. Farmers use hectares to measure fields, crop yields, irrigation requirements, and livestock capacity. Foresters rely on hectares for forest inventories, timber production estimates, and biodiversity assessments. Urban planners use hectares when describing zoning, green space, and population density. The hectare is the perfect intermediate scale: large enough for meaningful land plots, and small enough to avoid unwieldy numbers when describing farms or urban districts.
Arpent (arpent (area))
The arpent is a historical French land-measurement unit whose exact value varied across regions but is commonly taken as about 0.34 hectares, or roughly 3,400 square meters. The arpent was widely used in France before the metric system and carried over into French colonial territories, especially Louisiana, Quebec, and the Caribbean. In North America, the arpent became intertwined with colonial land grants, settlement patterns, and agricultural design. Properties in Louisiana often follow long, narrow "ribbon farms" extending from riverbanks, measured in arpents of frontage width. This arrangement maximized river access for transportation and irrigation, producing a unique landscape still visible today. Because of its regional variation, historians and land-survey experts must interpret arpents within local context. In Louisiana, an arpent is typically standardized to 0.84628 acres for legal purposes, but French historical documents may use values closer to half a hectare. The arpent thus reflects not only agricultural needs but also the administrative and cultural imprint of French colonization on North American geography.