In late February, farmers from throughout the US will collect in Houston, Texas, to witness the crowning of their champions: the winners of the National Corn Yield Contest. Every yr, hundreds of members brush up on the competition’s 17-page rule e book and then try to plough, plant, and fertilize their approach into the file books. Their purpose? To squeeze as a lot corn as attainable from every sq. meter of farmland.
The total winner in 2023—and in 2021, 2019, and 9 occasions earlier than that—was David Hula, a farmer from Charles City, Virginia. Hula is one thing just like the Michael Phelps of aggressive corn yields. He units information, smashes them, then comes again for extra. In 2023, his 623.84 bushels of corn per acre was greater than three and a half occasions the nationwide common.
A bunch of farmers competing to win a nationwide garland may appear to be a little bit of rural frippery, however Hula’s file will get at one thing necessary. It exhibits simply how a lot meals will be grown if farmers use each device at their disposal: high-yielding seed varieties, harmonious mixtures of pesticides and herbicides, precision-applied fertilizer, the correct amount of water precisely when it’s wanted, and so on. Get these components proper and farmers can dramatically enhance how a lot meals they produce on a given piece of land—doubtlessly releasing up land elsewhere for forests or rewilding.
A brand new examine into crop yields between 1975 and 2010 checked out the place crop yields have lagged or raced forward. The outcomes give us some tantalizing clues about the place farmers and coverage ought to focus to be able to feed extra folks with out turning tons extra land into farms. Even extra importantly, they recommend some huge areas the place sky-high yields may level to missed alternatives in relation to feeding the world extra sustainably.
The winners of the National Corn Yield Contest showcase the stonkingly excessive yields farmers can obtain, however most farmers globally don’t have entry to the shiniest farm know-how. As a consequence, their yields are decrease, which brings us to an idea referred to as the yield hole. Roughly talking, that is the distinction between the theoretical most quantity of crops a farmer may develop per hectare in a given local weather if all the pieces went completely and the precise quantity they develop.
To see the yield hole in motion, examine two necessary corn producers: the US and Kenya. In the US, the common yield is round 10.8 tons per hectare, whereas in Kenya it’s 1.5 tons. While the US could be very near its most theoretical corn yields, Kenya—taking into consideration its totally different local weather—is approach beneath its theoretical most. In different phrases, the US barely has a corn yield hole in any respect, whereas Kenya has a yield hole of about 2.7 tons per hectare beneath its theoretical most.
Yield gaps are necessary as a result of they inform us the place farms may turn into way more productive, says James Gerber, a knowledge scientist on the local weather nonprofit Project Drawdown and lead writer of the paper. Raising yields in sub-Saharan Africa is especially essential as a result of it’s already one of many hungriest elements of the world, and the inhabitants there may be projected to double by 2050.