Chapter 3 - Corn and Grain Sorghum Historical Yield, Area, and Price Trends

Abstract

Harvested corn area has been increasing in the United States since the early 1970s, while sorghum harvest area has been on the decline. Different reasons have been forwarded as underlying this trend. The objective of this chapter is to investigate, compare, and document historical trends of grain sorghum and corn yield, harvested area, and price. Historical data for both corn and sorghum, available from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, were used to compare the two crops in nine agricultural districts of Kansas. For most of the years between 1970 and the early 2000s, dryland sorghum had greater harvested area in central and eastern Kansas. In the west, harvest area of irrigated corn and dryland sorghum was greater than dryland corn and irrigated sorghum. Dryland corn harvest area started to increase in the mid-1990s and has surpassed the area occupied by dryland sorghum in the east, northeast, and west-central districts since the mid-2000s. A significant (P<0.05) yield advantage of dryland sorghum over dryland corn or vice versa was not observed in any decade between 1970 and 2011 or in any crop reporting district, except for eastern Kansas where dryland corn yielded better than dryland sorghum in the most recent decade (2000–2011). Dryland corn yield had the highest year-to-year variability in all districts. The price difference between the two crops has increased from about $0.007kg−1 in the years between 1949 and 1973 to $0.014kg−1 for the years 1974–2011. In addition to other reasons, a yield advantage in the east and a price difference between the two crops with relatively similar yields in the other districts might have contributed to dryland corn expansion in Kansas.