Agricultural productivity growth – producing more output with the same inputs – in the U.S. has slowed significantly in the last decade, new analysis finds. Globally, growth has also dipped and now stands well below the rate required to sustainably meet evolving global demand.
The findings signal “a critical need to reinvigorate progress,” says Virginia Tech’s 2025 Global Agricultural Productivity Report, published Wednesday.
The report notes that growing global incomes, population growth and expanding non-food uses for crops – including biofuels – are set to increase global agricultural demand by around 1% a year annually through 2031. Productivity growth, however, now stands at just 0.76 percentage points annually.
Virginia Tech researchers estimate that an average annual productivity growth rate of 1.73% is necessary to meet estimated demand by 2050, while keeping global ag’s environmental and geographical footprint to 2010 levels.
“We will fall far below the [total factor productivity] growth needed to sustainably supply our needs for agricultural products unless we change course,” Tom Thomas, associate dean and director at Virginia Tech’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the report’s executive editor, said during a launch event on Wednesday.
Because of the slowdown in productivity growth, researchers are revising their estimate upwards for the rate of annual growth now required to sustainably meet demand by 2050 to 2%.
The U.S., a previous leader in global ag productivity growth, has undergone a particularly sharp slowdown, the report finds. Over the last decade, the U.S. has averaged negative annual productivity growth, after topping 2% annually in the 1980s.
The report’s authors argue that reduced public research and development and uneven adoption rates of new technologies are to blame.
“This ‘valley of death’ between innovation and on-farm practice reveals the need for strong knowledge transfer, extension services, and adoption support to convert new technologies into broad productivity gains,” the report reads.
The launch event featured speakers from multiple agricultural input providers that shared their perspective on the barriers to unlocking higher productivity growth. But it was Iowa-based corn and soybean farmer Benjamin Riensche, who owns Blue Diamond Farming Co., who offered the most scathing assessment of how successive U.S. agricultural policies and evolving market conditions have fostered a sclerotic innovation environment.
“We're really down to three major equipment companies,” Riensche said, complaining about market concentration among input providers. “We're down to three germplasm companies… If you want corn seed, that's going to come from Bayer and Syngenta and Corteva for the most part.” He added that there are just four major fertilizer companies.
“This might be a little sensitive in this crowd,” he said, addressing the audience in Chicago that included representatives from Bayer, Mosaic, Corteva and other multinational agricultural input providers.
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He said concentrated markets do not incentivize innovation. They reward companies that can squeeze “every last dollar out of the system that they're currently doing before they introduce something to replace their own successful sales," he said.
Reinsche also complained that tariffs on fertilizer products offer additional protection to domestic producers and further dull incentives to innovate.
“We need to make sure that we don't stymie innovation from the bottom up,” Reinsche warned.
Representatives from agricultural input suppliers at a later panel defended their investments in research and development. John Deere Director of Corporate Economics Kanlaya Barr said Deere spends more than $2 billion a year in R&D. Bayer Crop Science’s vice president of international affairs and sustainability strategy, Alejandra Castro, said the company’s R&D spending stands around $2.4 billion annually.
But they argued that new products face a slew of barriers before entering the market and once there, adoption rates among farmers can remain low for years.
Barr pointed out that variable rate application methods which allow farmers to apply fertilizer, herbicides, seed and water and varying rates across a field to reduce their use, have been taken up by less than half of farmers, despite being on the market for decades.
“We have a lot of technologies out there, but farmers are in tough situation,” Barr said. “I think the key point here is, ‘are there any other ways for us to kind of help farmers be able to take advantage of these low hanging fruits? And can we maybe help design some policies that could help incentivize some of these as well.”
Narrower profit margins could worsen the productivity growth decline, warned Gabriele Massimo Onorato, a senior adviser at International Farming.
“Innovation is expensive,” he said. Farmers, he said, are in “defensive mode” and may not be looking to make new capital investments to adopt the latest technologies and practices.
“Farmers right now are trying to cut all the cost they can to survive to the next season,” he warned.
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