Nation's Cropland Acres Slowly Shift

America’s cropland is slowly shifting. Of the nation’s top 10 crops by planted acres, only three have gained ground in the last quarter century: corn, soybeans and canola.

The rest - hay, wheat, cotton, sorghum, rice, oats and barley - have all lost acres to these expanding crops, development or other uses since 2000.

Lost ground doesn’t always mean lost production, thanks to improved yields. But it does show how clearly the nation has shifted from four dominant crops to just two, as corn and soybeans push into new territory, primarily replacing wheat and hay. (chart animation)

Bruce Haines, who farms 800 acres near Mitchell, South Dakota, reluctantly dropped hard red winter wheat from his crop rotation a few years ago.

Bruce Haines, Producer - Mitchell, South Dakota: “Typically a third of my crop would have been wheat so I would have been farming 240 acres of wheat a year. None this year… It has been three years since I raised wheat.”

He’s not alone. This animation from USDA’s Cropland CROS tool, set to run from 2007 to 2024, illustrates how wheat is disappearing from eastern South Dakota.

Bruce Haines, Producer - Mitchell, South Dakota: “In this country, we’ve  been raising wheat since the settlers got here at the turn of the century and all the sudden, you know, marketing challenges and weather challenges and profitability kind of stand in the way of wheat acres so we’ve moved more into the corn and soybean rotation…The wheat acres that we have now are probably half of what we would have had five, six, seven years ago… It’s really sad. I really, really enjoyed raising wheat.”

Projecting forward, corn and soybeans could jump from a combined 58 percent of major cropland acres today to 68 percent by 2050 - though dietary preferences, policy shifts, economic forces and weather could change that picture.

Haines, a board member for the South Dakota Soybean Research and Promotion Council, isn’t worried about corn and soybean dominance. He says farmers must make smart economic decisions, not emotional ones.

Bruce Haines, Producer - Mitchell, South Dakota: “I don’t think it’s a concern because I think that there’s a large shift in the biofuels and the petroleum market. I think that we all understand that what we used to get from the ground below and petroleum, now we have to raise those biofuels from the ground above.”

A soybean crushing plant, High Plains Processing, recently opened near Haines’ rural Mitchell farm, eliminating the need to ship soybeans by rail to West Coast ports.

Bruce Haines, Producer - Mitchell, South Dakota: “We have those renewable fuel plants: those are local markets. And so within three miles of my farm, they’re going to crush 35 million bushels of soybeans. And you know, we know that market is going to be there.”

That kind of infrastructure encourages more farmers to plant those crops. And when other crops disappear from a region, the supply-chain infrastructure often goes with them, making them harder to bring back.

Some argue nations can specialize if the world functions as a smooth global market. Others worry that politics, weather or conflict could disrupt that trade.

Sarah Carden, research and policy director at Farm Action, sees signs USDA is becoming more willing to also support higher-value, labor-intensive crops like fruits and vegetables – products the U.S. increasingly imports.

Sarah Carden, Research and Policy Director, Farm Action: “The recently announced bailout of $12 billion included $1 billion explicitly for specialty crop producers as a set aside…That's an exception. That's not you know, if you go back to like, the era of Trump One and we had a trade war and a bailout, that wasn't there. So that's a big change, right? Just this acknowledgment that there are other types of producers out there that … they too have high input costs, they too have challenges.”

Without greater crop diversity, Carden worries the U.S. will continue to deepen its agricultural trade deficit.

Sarah Carden, Research and Policy Director, Farm Action: “They were projecting in 2024, a $32 billion agricultural trade deficit. Because specialty crops are more valuable, you would only need to shift about 0.4 percent of the cropland into specialty crops to balance that trade deficit.” 

Carden says global specialization works – until something changes. Nations then discover how dependent they have become on one another.

Sarah Carden, Research and Policy Director, Farm Action: “That's very much like our relationship with Mexico, for instance. We grow a lot of cheap corn for them to import as feed. And they grow a lot of fruits and vegetables for us to import….So, you know, we’ve lost sovereignty. They’ve lost sovereignty….It creates a problematic power dynamic I think.”  

Experts say there’s also a small degree of agronomic risk in relying so heavily on just two crops. Florida’s loss of 90 percent of its citrus production due to a virus and insect combo offers a reminder of nature’s unpredictability. 

Since 2015, the USDA has offered Whole-Farm Revenue Protection insurance, in part designed to encourage greater agricultural diversity. Farms or ranches selling at least three distinct commodities or products can qualify for a higher level of protection under this federally subsidized insurance. Adoption has been slow, however -- only about 2,250 farms had the policy as of 2024 – though it has climbed in recent years.

In December 2025, the USDA Office of Inspector General found that the Risk Management Agency couldn't prove that its partner independent crop insurance agents were consistently offering the program to producers. The RMA agrees with the orders that it now must require agents to track that they offer all insurance options.

In the meantime, Haines continues watching for the right moment to bring wheat back into his rotation.

Bruce Haines, Producer - Mitchell, South Dakota: “There’s nothing more beautiful than a wheat field... If you are raising it just to be pretty, that’s good but if you are raising it for cash, there’s a shortcoming in that.”

By Colleen Bradford Krantz, colleen.krantz@iowapbs.org

Note: View the complete data and analysis behind this story, including projections for additional row crops, in our publicly accessible dataset (link to https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vghizy8jVzjWj1UoKI4u2_GiIgR7phkp/view?usp=sharing