America can grow three-times as much corn from a single acre of land as it can wheat and soy. This is the story of how corn became king in America.
To understand how this happened, Visual Capitalst’s Pallavi Rao visualizes the yields (measured in bushels per acre) for all three crops over the last century.
Data for this graphic is sourced from the National Agricultural Statistics Service, maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The Corny American Love Story
In 2023, America produced 500 million metric tons of corn, a figure so astoundingly large, it compares to the weight of 7,000 Great Pyramids of Gaza. And all of that corn was grown on 92 million acres of land—an area bigger than Malaysia.
But America’s colossal corn-producing prowess didn’t always exist, as seen in the yield data from 1866.