Wheat across the steppes, rice through monsoon Asia, maize and soya beans in the Americas, oil palm in Indonesia and Malaysia, cocoa in West Africa. A map of the world's farmland: the leading crop on every 10 km square, 34 crops one by one, and every country's cropland and pasture since 1961.
Most maps of farming show a country as a single colour. But a country is not one farm. The Punjab grows wheat in winter and rice in summer, the American Midwest is a patchwork of maize and soya beans, and a few hundred kilometres can take you from olive groves to wheat fields to grazing land. So I tried to map what the world grows at the finest scale open data allows, and to set it beside the longer story of how much land we farm and where that has changed.
Two sources do the work. CROPGRIDS, a global dataset published in 2024, estimates the harvested and physical area of 173 crops on a grid of 0.05 degrees (about 5.6 km at the equator) for around 2020. I use its 34 biggest and best-known crops, which between them cover 87% of the world's harvested area in FAO's figures. FAOSTAT, the statistics of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, gives every country's cropland, pasture and forest, and the harvested area of 157 crops, every year since 1961. Choose a view, then click anywhere on the map.
FAO counts 4,682 million hectares of farmland in 2023, 36% of the world's land. Only a third of it is cropland, land under arable crops, orchards and plantations: 1,583 million hectares, or 12% of the land. The other two thirds, 3,101 million hectares, are permanent meadows and pastures, from Mongolian steppe to Australian rangeland to Irish grass. Forest covers 32%.
World cropland and pasture, 1961 to 2023
Million hectares. FAOSTAT land use, sum of all countries. Hover for values.
The two lines tell different stories. Cropland has grown by 243 million hectares since 1961 (18%) and was larger in 2023 than ever before. Pasture rose until 2000 and has since fallen, so that the world's total farmland peaked in 2000 and is now 111 million hectares smaller. India, the United States, China and Russia hold the most cropland. Rwanda and Bangladesh have the highest share of their land under crops (70% and 68%), and Kazakhstan has the most per person, 1.5 hectares, against 0.09 in the United Kingdom.
Of the 181 countries with figures for both 1961 and today, cropland grew in 110 and shrank in 68. The biggest gains, comparing 1961 to 1963 with 2021 to 2023, were in Brazil (+31.5 million hectares), Argentina (+28.4), Indonesia (+24.6) and China (+23.8), then Nigeria and Australia. The biggest loss by far was in the United States (25.9 million hectares fewer), then Italy, Poland, Spain and France. The countries of the former Soviet Union farm 18.3 million hectares less cropland than the USSR did in the late 1980s.
The biggest changes in cropland since 1961
Million hectares, 2021 to 2023 average against 1961 to 1963. Countries that existed in 1961.
FAO records 1,493 million hectares of crops harvested in 2024, 54% more than in 1961 (land cropped twice in a year counts twice). Wheat (220 million hectares), maize (210), rice (172) and soya beans (143) together cover 50% of it. The growth since 1961 has been driven by oil and animal feed: soya beans, oil palm and maize alone account for 48% of the extra 521 million hectares. Oil palm has grown eightfold and soya beans sixfold. The losers are the old cereals of northern Europe: the world harvests 88% less rye and 78% less oats than in 1961.
Harvested area of the 34 crops, 1961 and 2024
Million hectares, FAOSTAT. The bar is 2024; the tick is 1961. Click a crop to map it.
On the grid, wheat is the leading crop on 26% of the world's farmed 10 km squares (those where these crops cover at least 1% of the land), maize on 23%, rice on 10% and soya beans on 8%. Cereals lead on 68% of farmed squares. Some crops are tied to a few places: 85% of the world's rice is harvested in South, Southeast and East Asia, 74% of its soya beans in the Americas, 67% of its oil palm in Indonesia and Malaysia, and 66% of its cocoa in West Africa, 46% in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana alone.
Most places grow a mix. In just over half of the world's harvested area (53%) one crop takes at least half the land of its 10 km square; the average square, weighted by area, has the diversity of 4.0 equally common crops. The most mixed farming, on this measure, is in Belarus, Haiti, the Central African Republic and Nigeria; the most single-minded is in Malaysia (oil palm), Afghanistan and Kazakhstan (wheat) and Bangladesh (rice).
By harvested area, averaged over 2022 to 2024, wheat is the biggest crop in 42 of 198 countries, maize in 32 and rice in 22, and coconuts lead in 17, all of them island states. The United States, Brazil and Argentina grow more soya beans than anything else, Ukraine more sunflowers, Malaysia and Indonesia more oil palm, Côte d'Ivoire more cocoa and Spain more olives.
The biggest crop in each country
Number of countries in which each crop has the largest harvested area (FAOSTAT, 2022 to 2024 average, 198 countries).
The biggest crop is often the expected one. The speciality is more revealing: the crop a country grows far more of, relative to its farmland, than the world does. I measure it with a location quotient, a crop's share of a country's harvested area divided by its share of the world's, among crops that fill at least 1% of the country's harvested land. Saudi Arabia gives 34% of its harvested area to dates, 374 times the world share. Madagascar's speciality is vanilla, New Zealand's kiwi fruit, Bolivia's quinoa, Turkey's hazelnuts and the United Kingdom's field beans.
The UK is mostly grass: pasture covers 45% of its land and cropland 25%, and its cropland is 17% smaller than in the early 1960s. On the arable land, wheat, barley and rapeseed fill 76% of the harvested area, and wheat alone 40%. On the 5 km grid, wheat is the leading crop in squares holding 57% of the UK's harvested area, mostly in the east and south, and barley in squares holding 40%, from the Borders to Aberdeenshire and Northern Ireland.
UK harvested area, 1961 to 2024
Thousand hectares, FAOSTAT. Hover for values.
Sixty years have reshuffled the fields. Oats fell from 704,292 hectares in 1961 to 182,046 in 2024 and potatoes from 303,000 to 118,407. Rapeseed, the crop that turns fields yellow in May, barely existed in 1961 (600 hectares), passed 10,000 hectares in 1973 and peaked at 755,717 in 2012 before falling back to 293,231. Field beans, the UK's speciality, have grown from almost nothing to 135,387 hectares.
A note on UK maize. CROPGRIDS puts 830,562 hectares of maize in the UK, but FAOSTAT records no grain maize there at all. The UK cells come from a European source dataset within CROPGRIDS, probably counting maize grown for silage, so on the world map maize leads in many pastoral squares of the west and in Ireland. The UK figures above leave maize out.
The finest open global picture of crops is CROPGRIDS, at 0.05 degrees: 2,851,739 grid cells with at least one of these crops. It is a model, not a census. Its authors combined 29 earlier maps (national and regional statistics, satellite crop maps and older global grids such as SPAM and Monfreda's maps) and adjusted them to FAOSTAT. Where an input was coarser, CROPGRIDS spreads it across finer cells, so the true detail is often nearer 10 km than 5 km. That is why the map here uses 0.1 degree squares (about 11 km), and why single squares should not be read too literally. CROPGRIDS gives each cell a quality score from 0 to 1; the area-weighted average for these crops is 0.79, lowest for sesame, rubber, oats and rye.
It is also a single snapshot, around 2020. For change over time the detail falls to the country: FAOSTAT has every country's harvested area for each crop every year since 1961, and land use to 2023. Countries that broke up, such as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, start again from their first year as new states. Summed by country, CROPGRIDS and FAOSTAT 2020 agree closely (correlation 0.99 on a log scale across 166 countries; CROPGRIDS totals 97% of FAOSTAT's area for these crops), but single crops in single countries can differ a lot.
Half of the world's harvested area of these crops lies on 6.4% of its land.
Crops on the grid. I summed the CROPGRIDS harvested area of each of the 34 crops from 0.05 to 0.1 degree squares. In each square the dominant crop is the one with the largest harvested area and the diversity is the effective number of crops (the exponential of the Shannon index of their shares). A square counts as farmed when these crops' harvested area is at least 1% of its area. Harvested area counts land twice when it is cropped twice, which matters for rice. The concentration figure ranks squares by harvested area per hectare of land and asks how much land holds half the total.
Countries. FAOSTAT land use (country area, cropland, permanent meadows and pastures, forest) and crop harvested area, with regional totals removed and China counted once (mainland China and Taiwan separately). The biggest crop and the speciality use the 2022 to 2024 average of all 157 FAOSTAT crops; specialities are for countries with at least 100,000 hectares harvested. Change in cropland compares three-year averages to smooth single bad years.
What this is not. It is a map of area, not of production, value or calories: a hectare of wheat in Kazakhstan and a hectare of tomatoes in the Netherlands count the same. The 34 crops leave out vegetables, most fruit and fodder crops. The grid is modelled and in places wrong (see the note on UK maize), and FAOSTAT figures for some countries are estimates.