Crop Yields
Increasing crop yields is crucial to improve food security, living standards, and reduce human impacts on the environment.
Improvements in crop yields have been essential to feed a growing population while reducing the environmental impact of food production at the same time. Increasing crop yields can reduce the amount of land we use for agriculture.
Crop yields might seem far from being one of the world's largest problems. But, if yields and labor productivity do not increase, it will have far-reaching consequences for global poverty and the protection of the environment. For people and the planet, it’s one of our most important problems to work on.
You can find all our data, visualizations, and writing relating to crop yields on this page.
Research & Writing
Increasing agricultural productivity across Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most important problems this century
Agricultural productivity across Sub-Saharan Africa needs to improve to reduce hunger, poverty, and the destruction of biodiversity.
Do we only have 60 harvests left?
Claims that the world has only 100, 60, or even 30 years of harvests left often hit the headlines. These claims are overblown, but soil erosion is a problem and we can do something about it.
All charts
Cereal yield vs. fertilizer use
Cereal yields
Change in cereal production, yield, land use and population
Crop yields
How much cropland has the world spared due to increases in crop yields?
Almond yields
Area of land needed to meet global vegetable oil demand
Area of land needed to produce one tonne of vegetable oil
Banana yields
Barley yields
Bean yields
Cashew nut yields
Cassava yields
Cereal yield vs. GDP per capita
Cereal yield vs. extreme poverty rate
Change in production, yield and land use of oil palm fruit
Cocoa bean yields
Coffee bean yields
Corn yields
Corn: Attainable crop yields
Corn: Yield gap
Cotton yields
Groundnut yields
Lettuce yields
Millet yields
Oil palm fruit yields
Oil yields by crop type
Orange yields
Pea yields
Potato yields
Rapeseed yields
Rice yields
Rye yields
Sorghum yields
Soybean yields
Sugar beet yields
Sugar cane yields
Sunflower seed yields
Tomato yields
Wheat yields
Which countries overapplied nitrogen without gains in crop yields?
Yields of important staple crops
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Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as:
Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2022) - “Crop Yields” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields' [Online Resource]BibTeX citation
@article{owid-crop-yields,
author = {Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado and Max Roser},
title = {Crop Yields},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2022},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields}
}
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