Estimating the global number and distribution of maize and wheat farms

By O. Erenstein, Jordan Chamberlin, K. Sonder. 2021

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Strategic planning for global agricultural R&D is hampered by a lack of comparable data on target populations. Surprisingly, even the global number of crop-specific farms are unavailable for any given year. We estimate the number of farms growing maize and wheat – the two most important cereals globally – at multiple geographic scales. For 2020, we estimate that a third and a fifth of global farms cultivated maize and wheat respectively. For 2030, we estimate the number of maize farms to increase by 5% (from 216 to 227 million) and wheat farms to decrease by 4% (from 135 to 130 million). Our estimation approach can be extended to other crops, and can contribute to improved agricultural investment programming.

Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b43824526b779a86eac5bdfcd2e9158ee03753bc