Maps and Data - U.S. Corn Productivity and Land Use

This chart shows average corn yield per acre and total harvested acres of corn in the United States between 1867 and 2014. In the 1940s, modern agricultural advances began to push corn yields upward, increasing the number of bushels produced on each acre of land. This allowed total cultivated acreage to decline, even as population has increased. Ethanol production has brought many of these acres back into agricultural production in recent years, but because land is much more productive now, there are still fewer acres harvested than at the turn of the last century. The temporary drop in productivity in 2012 was due to drought.