Corn and soybeans are the two most widely grown crops in the nation, forecast at 174 million acres this year, or slightly more than half of the land devoted to the two dozen “principal” crops of the United States. Growers are adjusting their registry of subsidy-eligible land to reflect the dominance of the crops, say economists Gary Schnitkey, Jonathan Coppess and Nick Paulson of U-Illinois. They point to USDA data that shows farmers named an additional 12.8 million acres of land as corn “base” and designated an additional 4.7 million acres as soybean base. The 2014 farm law gave growers the option to re-align base acres to reflect their plantings in recent years. Corn and soybeans were the only crops to see an increase in base acres of more than 1 million acres, the economists write at farmdoc daily.
Wheat had the largest decline in base acres, down 9.8 million acres. Barley was down 3.5 million acres, sorghum was down 2.6 million acres and oats were down by 957,000 acres. As recently as 2008, growers planted 63 million acres of wheat, but plantings of 55.4 million acres are forecast for this year. Meanwhile, soybean plantings are expected to be record-large for the second year in a row and corn plantings this year are expected to be 9-percent larger than a decade ago.
“The base acre decisions of U.S. farmers highlight the continuing trend within the U.S. crop sector of specialization in corn and soybeans, a trend facilitated when the 1996 farm bill eliminated annual acreage set asides in a policy change often called ‘freedom to farm,'” the economists write. “These interrelationships underscore a historical feature of U.S. farm policy: Market-determined trends almost always become reflected in U.S. farm policy.”