Convert Hectare (ha) to Barn (b (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.
Barn (b (area))
The barn is an area unit used almost exclusively in nuclear and particle physics, equal to 10⁻²⁸ square meters. Despite its incredibly tiny size, the barn emerged from humorous origins: early nuclear physicists joked that certain atomic nuclei were "as big as a barn" compared to the particles trying to hit them. The barn quantifies interaction cross-sections—essentially probabilities of particles colliding or interacting with nuclei. Because fundamental forces operate at extremely small scales, typical cross-section values lie in the microbarn, nanobarn, or picobarn range. The barn is essential for describing reaction rates in particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, and astrophysical processes such as stellar fusion.