The harvest.
In 1961 a hectare of the world's cereal land gave 1.35 tonnes of grain; in 2024 it gives 4.21 — 3.1 times the harvest from the same field. Over the same years the arable land behind each living person fell by half, 0.36 hectares to 0.17 — the two lines moved together, and this report draws them side by side without merging them. The long record holds a quieter turn: grazing land, the largest human use of land on Earth, peaked in 2001 at 3.28 billion hectares and has fallen since. No counterfactual is computed anywhere on this page — the numbers are the publishers' own, and every figure is asked of the records at render time.
published 2026-08-29 · yields and arable land 1961 onward · long-run land use from reconstruction, labeled · edition 1 — updated only by a new dated edition · sources: FAO via OWID · HYDE via OWID
3.1 times the grain from the same field.
The world's cereal yield, year by year since 1961. It has never been a spike — it is a staircase six decades long; its highest step is 2023, and the record's last year sits one shade below it — 4.21 against 4.23.
Half the land per person.
While the yield line climbed, the arable land behind each living person fell from 0.36 to 0.17 hectares. Two series, two units, drawn side by side and never merged — the pairing is the finding, and no arithmetic between them is performed or implied.
The long field, and the pasture peak.
The HYDE reconstruction of cropland and grazing across ten millennia: flat for a hundred centuries, vertical in the last one. And inside the last century, the quiet turn — grazing land peaked in 2001 and has fallen since, while cropland still creeps upward.
The revolution did not arrive everywhere.
Eight countries' cereal yields since 1961. The staircase is real on every line — but Nigeria's 2024 yield, 1.56 tonnes per hectare, is scarcely above the world's 1961 figure of 1.35. The revolution is a fact and its unevenness is one too; both are on this board.
Whose numbers, and what this page refuses.
Whose numbers. Yields and arable land per person are FAO series as Our World in Data publishes them, in the publishers' own units — tonnes per hectare, hectares per person. The long-run land series is HYDE, also via OWID: a model-based reconstruction of historical land use, and every exhibit that draws it says so. A reconstruction shown as a reconstruction is honest; shown as a measurement it would not be.
The counterfactual this page refuses. The famous "land spared by the green revolution" figure requires freezing 1961's yield and computing the land today's harvest would need at that rate — a model, whichever way it is phrased. This page draws the yield line and the land line side by side and performs no arithmetic between them. A reader who wants the counterfactual can build it; this page's job is the record.
What else is absent, and why. No yield series before 1961 is drawn: the long-run single-country yield routes this page could verify are no longer published at source, and a famous historical number without a live record is exactly what this site does not print. Ukraine's line begins in 1992 because the file's does. The pasture peak is annotated from the maximum of the series itself, not from any narrative about it.