Ranked: America’s Top Crops by Acres Harvested in 2023

Ranked: America’s Top Crops by Acres Harvested in 2023

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Most of the American tilled farmland is taken up by one of three top crops. And interestingly, wheat isn’t one of them.

This graphic breaks down the most harvested crops in the U.S., by acres reaped in 2023. Data is sourced from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Corn is King in America

By acreage, corn is the most planted crop in the U.S., covering 93 million acres, an area almost the size of Montana.

Meanwhile, soybean (82 million acres) could blanket New Mexico, and hay (53 million acres) could spread over Kansas.

All together, their fields together account for 75% of all harvested cropland in the country, an area more than the size of Texas.

However, this isn’t the full picture. Corn and soybean may be separated by about 11 million cultivated acres between them, but their output gap is much larger.

Yields of Fields

America produced more than 500 million metric tons of corn in 2023 compared to 113 million metric tons of soybean.

As it happens, corn yields, (measured in bushels per acre) are nearly 4x higher than soybean yields. More than a hundred years of research and investment has quite literally made America a corn country. On average it accounts for one-third of global corn production far eclipsing closest competitor China.

Importantly corn, soybean, and hay are used mostly for animal feed in America, though corn is also used for biofuels and manufacturing high fructose corn syrup.

Other major crops by area harvested include: cotton (7 million acres), sorghum (6 million acres), rice, barley, and canola (all 2 million acres each).

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For related content check out Comparing Corn Yields to Wheat and Soybean which tracks bushels per acre produced for these three crops over a hundred years.