US is Rarely #1 in Yields
I think it is fairly common for us as Americans to assume that our agricultural production leads the world in yields. But when you review the average yields by variety, in many cases, the US does not even make the top 5 for yield. Part of this may be due to smaller countries using irrigation on all of their crops for that particular variety; but having visited Europe a few times and viewing their agricultural production, I can vouch that many of these farmers “baby” their crops more than we do. Many of them make a living off of a 100 acres instead of a 1,000, so they have to maximize their yields.
For example, I pulled the top 5 yielding countries for various crops as follows:
Corn
- Jordan 318 bushels per acre
- Chile 191 bushels per acre
- New Zealand 175 bushels per acre
- US 159 bushels per acre
- Canada 143 bushels per acre
Soybeans
- Argentina 43 bushels per acre
- US 41 bushels per acre
- Brazil 40 bushels per acre
- Canada 37 bushels per acre
- China 27 bushels per acre
Wheat
- New Zealand 119 bushels per acre
- Zambia 104 bushels per acre
- Switzerland 89 bushels per acre
- Chile 88 bushels per acre
- Egypt 87 bushels per acre
As you can see, for corn we are number 4, soybeans number 2 and for wheat, we don’t make the top 5.
Many of these countries can learn from our production methods, but I think we can learn from theirs too.
Paul Neiffer
Paul Neiffer is a certified public accountant and business advisor specializing in income taxation, accounting services, and succession planning for farmers and agribusiness processors. Paul is a principal with CliftonLarsonAllen in Walla Walla, Washington, as well as a regular speaker at national conferences and contributor at agweb.com. Raised on a farm in central Washington, he has been immersed in the ag industry his entire life, including the last 30 years professionally. Paul and his wife purchase an 180 acre ranch in 2016 and enjoy keeping it full of animals.
Paul,
Really interesting post. Something that jumped out at me was the need to keep in mind the spatial context of these numbers. Lets take Chile and Jordan corn production for example.
According to the 2003 FAO data Jordan only rasied 430 hectares (1,062 acres). Chile has a great irrigated growing environment, but you have to keep scale in mind. According to the FAO Chile produces about 1.19 million metric tons of corn (about 47.6 million bushels). In the US we have COUNTIES that produce almost that much corn (Yuma county, CO produces about 42 million bushels per year).
Thanks for the article and the food for thought.