This study actually kind of shifts back and forth between a couple of ideas.
YIELD is the amount of crop per area of land. That’s the intensity/ efficiency / resources / technology getting the highest output on this amount of space.
PRODUCTION is the total output. That’s the YIELD times the AREA. Area can go up and down as a second major variable.
Farmers abandon land or change crops to grazing etc when the soil or water falls. So you can have great technology for getting the most corn yield per hectare, but the amount of viable hectares can be going down.
The facts and figures mingle these ideas together in the paper and make it hard to track what’s being said.
Total food production is going down 4.4% per degree of warming (from today’s levels).
It’s confusing because they say corn will lose 40% of production but 6% of yields. Just to be clear, production is the net food coming out. So basically reading between the lines, we lose the crop land in that example.
This study actually kind of shifts back and forth between a couple of ideas.
YIELD is the amount of crop per area of land. That’s the intensity/ efficiency / resources / technology getting the highest output on this amount of space.
PRODUCTION is the total output. That’s the YIELD times the AREA. Area can go up and down as a second major variable.
Farmers abandon land or change crops to grazing etc when the soil or water falls. So you can have great technology for getting the most corn yield per hectare, but the amount of viable hectares can be going down.
The facts and figures mingle these ideas together in the paper and make it hard to track what’s being said.
Original paper is here :
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09085-w
Total food production is going down 4.4% per degree of warming (from today’s levels).
It’s confusing because they say corn will lose 40% of production but 6% of yields. Just to be clear, production is the net food coming out. So basically reading between the lines, we lose the crop land in that example.