Abstract
Wheat production is required to supply food for the world’s population, and increases in production will be necessary to feed the expanding population. Estimates show that production must increase by 1 billion metric tons to meet this demand. One method to meet future demand is to increase wheat yields by reducing the gap between actual and potential yields. Potential yields represent an optimum set of conditions, and a more realistic metric would be to compare actual yields with attainable yields, where these yields represent years in the record where there is no obvious limitation. This study was conducted to evaluate the yield trends, attainable yields, and yield gaps for the 10 largest wheat producing countries in the world and more localized yield statistics at the state or county level. These data were assembled from available government sources. Attainable yield was determined using an upper quantile analysis to define the upper frontier of yields over the period of record and yield gaps calculated as the difference between attainable yield and actual yield for each year and expressed as a percentage of the attainable yield. In all countries, attainable yield increase over time was larger than the yield trend indicating the technological advances in genetics and agronomic practices were increasing attainable yield. Yield gaps have not shown a decrease over time and reflect that weather during the growing season remains the primary limitation to production. Yield gap closure will require that local producers adopt practices that increase their climate resilience in wheat production systems.
Highlights
Productivity of agricultural commodities throughout the world must increase in order to supply the food needs of the expanding population. Alexandros and Bruinsma (2012) estimated that by 2050, an additional 1 billion metric tons per year of cereals would be needed to meet the demand, which would require an increase in production from 2.1 to 3.0 billion metric tons
The assumption made was that the slope of the Yat line would represent the technology increase for a given country, while the slope of Ya would represent the ability of the country-level yields to increase given the combination of technology and weather within the growing season
If technology was the only factor contributing to the yield trend, the expectation would be for the slopes of the lines to be similar; the slopes were significantly different (ρ < 0.01) using simple T-test
Summary
Productivity of agricultural commodities throughout the world must increase in order to supply the food needs of the expanding population. Alexandros and Bruinsma (2012) estimated that by 2050, an additional 1 billion metric tons per year of cereals would be needed to meet the demand, which would require an increase in production from 2.1 to 3.0 billion metric tons. Alexandros and Bruinsma (2012) estimated that by 2050, an additional 1 billion metric tons per year of cereals would be needed to meet the demand, which would require an increase in production from 2.1 to 3.0 billion metric tons. This requires that we either increase yield of crops through closing the yield gap between the potential and actual yields or by increasing the potential yield of crops. Most would argue that decreasing the yield gap is more achievable than increasing the potential yield. If we assume that the potential yield can be described as
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