A recent Associated Press (AP) story carried by WCVB-TV and many other news outlets warned that “climate change is making it ‘dicier’ to grow corn in the United States. This is false. [emphasis, links added]
Data clearly shows that amid modest climate change, corn yields and production have increased steadily, regularly setting new records.
The AP writes:
Across major corn-growing states, climate change is fueling conditions that make watching the corn grow a nail-biter for farmers. Factors like consistently high summer overnight temperatures, droughts and heavier-than-usual rains at the wrong time can all disrupt the plants’ pollination — making each full ear of corn less of a guarantee and more of a gamble.
Overall, corn growers got lucky this year with late-season weather that contributed to what is now predicted to be a record bumper crop. But experts say bouts of extreme weather are intensifying the waiting game during a critical time of year between planting and harvest.
Human-caused climate change has worsened multiple U.S. extreme heat events this year and has steadily increased the likelihood of hotter overnight temperatures since 1970, according to Climate Central, an independent group of scientists who communicate climate science and data to the public.
The AP’s narrative is a pure lie, debunked within its own paragraphs.
Corn growers didn’t get lucky this year with a bumper crop; rather, bumper crops have been a trend during the recent period of modest warming, even with the normal annual ups and downs inherent to crop production.
The USDA meteorologist, Brad Rippey, who the AP quoted, described 2025 production as a “monster U.S. corn crop.” But it’s not the first monster crop in the past few decades for U.S. corn farmers.
The numbers tell a clear and compelling story of rising corn production. The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed record national yields of 179.3 bushels per acre in 2024, breaking the previous record set only a year earlier in 2023.
Long-term records from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show U.S. corn yields have more than tripled since 1961, rising from around 3.5 tons per hectare to more than 11 tons today, as seen in the figure below:
Economists at the University of Illinois calculate that yields have increased by nearly two bushels per acre every year since 1950.
These are not the marks of a crop in decline — they are the hallmarks of long-term improvement from better farming practices, yield-improved varieties, selective breeding practices to improve resiliency to weather factors, and boosted production due to carbon dioxide fertilization.
The significant gains in yields have also produced records for production, with U.S. Department of Agriculture data showing each of the past ten years of production as having been higher than any previous years or decades in history, with new records for production being set three times since 2016.
To tie corn growers’ concerns to climate change, the AP article relied on a small number of anecdotes about heat, corn tassel timing, and the fragility of pollination.
Yes, these can matter for pollination in a particular field, but they have always been part of farming. Weather extremes are nothing new, and across hundreds of posts, Climate Realism has cited data across a range of stories showing extreme weather hasn’t become more frequent, severe, or inconsistent in recent years.
What matters is the nationwide harvest, and it keeps breaking records. If the climate were truly making corn “dicier,” record-breaking yields would not keep piling up.
The real problem corn producers face at the moment is not crop decline, but instead just the opposite: crop abundance and farming success.
Bumper crops have produced an oversupply to the market that is resulting in lower prices, even as ever more corn is being diverted from grocery shelves to gas tanks as ethanol requirements creep up.
Farmers are not watching their livelihoods wither under climate change. Instead, they are wrestling with the economic consequences of overproduction, as a variety of news outlets have reported recently.
On the same day, the AP was incorrectly bemoaning corn declines with a story titled, “Huge Crops in Corn Belt Hit Cash-Strapped Farmers With More Unease,” published in the Wall Street Journal.
Just a few days earlier, in a story subtitled, “so much corn, so little profit, NewsNation reported that with the USDA projecting 16.7 billion bushels of corn in 2025, the largest in American history, the glut is pushing prices to multi-year lows, with Iowa producers estimating losses of $80 to $100 per acre at current bids.
That is not a climate crisis; it is an economic one caused by success.
So contrary to the AP’s claims, the real problem facing corn farmers is not extreme, unpredictable weather and crop diseases hampering production, but rather oversupply of the market due to record-setting production, the latter a regular occurrence across the first quarter of the 21st century as global temperatures have continued to rise modestly.
Top photo by Michael Trimble on Unsplash
Read more at Climate Realism
