Biology · Crop Productivity

World Cereal Yield

The Green Revolution in one line: 3.11× the grain per hectare since 1961, and never exponential.

• 1,353.2 → 4,205.8 kg/ha, 3.11× in 63 years
• Linear, not exponential: 2.2% a year → 1.4%
• Area up 15%, output more than tripled
• FAO’s aggregate; harvested area, not planted

World cereal yield is how much dry grain the planet takes off each hectare it harvests, and FAO has published it every year since 1961: 1,353.2 kg a hectare then, 4,205.8 in 2024, 3.11 times as much in 63 years, from ground that barely grew. Harvested cereal area went from 648 million hectares to 745 million, up 15%, while output more than tripled, so almost all the extra grain came out of the hectare and not out of new hectares. That is the Green Revolution, and it was never a constant exponential. The absolute gains hold while the percentage decelerates: the first half of the record, 1961 to 1993, added 1,384.5 kg a hectare, and the second, 1993 to 2024, added 1,468.1, slightly more grain on a base that had doubled, so compound growth fell from 2.2% a year to 1.4%, and the last ten years are slower still at 0.8% a year.

A straight line fits these 64 points better than a compound curve does, R² 0.993 against 0.980, which is why the axis is linear. A stack of separate technologies makes that shape: semi-dwarf wheat and rice that put growth into grain rather than straw and stand up under heavy feeding, synthetic nitrogen, irrigation and mechanisation, each arriving somewhere in the world at a different time and each adding its own increment per hectare rather than multiplying what came before.

‘Cereals, primary’ is FAO’s own item aggregate, so the crop mix shifts underneath it, and yield here is production over area harvested, not area planted: a crop abandoned before harvest never enters the denominator. Of the 63 year-on-year steps, 18 are down, the deepest 3.1%. Seven values from the 1960s and 1970s carry FAO’s estimated flag. The series peaks in 2023 at 4,228.3 and gives back 0.5% in 2024, which is one year and the eighteenth of those down steps, not an ending.

Source: FAOSTAT Production: Crops and Livestock Products

Download the data: world_cereal_yield.csv · world_cereal_yield.json

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