American farmers planted 94.1 million acres of corn this year, up 6 percent from last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported Friday.
In Iowa — the No. 1 corn-producing state — farmers said in March they planned to plant 13.1 million acres of corn, about 1.5 percent more than in 2022.
The USDA data released Friday comes from surveys of 9,100 segments of land and nearly 64,000 farm operations during the first week of June to gather information on what farmers actually planted. The new data isn’t broken down by state.
Soybean acres planted across the U.S. in 2023 fell 5 percent to 83.5 million acres.
The USDA also reported Friday how many acres farmers expect to harvest, which is lower than the acres planted.
- 86.3 million acres of corn for grain, up 9 percent from 2022
- 82.7 million acres of soybeans, down 4 percent
- 49.6 million acres of wheat, up 9 percent
- 11.1 million acres of cotton, down 19 percent
Just how much corn farmers harvest will be determined, in part, by whether the Midwest gets more rain.
Despite some brief rains this week, about 80 percent of corn and soybean crops in Illinois and Iowa — which together produce more than a quarter of the nation’s total — face drought conditions.
Of all the corn grown in the United States, 99 percent is field corn, also called dent corn because of the dent that forms in the kernel as the corn dries, the Iowa Corn Growers Association reported. The other 1 percent is sweet corn.
About 45 percent of corn grown across the U.S. is used to make ethanol, the USDA reports. In Iowa, 57 percent of field corn goes to ethanol production. Other corn becomes animal feed or is processed into human food, such as cereal, cornstarch and corn oil.
Source: The Gazette
