Justin Fox, Columnist

The U.S. Is Growing More Corn Than It Can Handle

The spectacular productivity gains of the past 90 years are a miracle — and a problem.

September 24, 2019 at 1:00 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

So corny.
Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

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This year’s U.S. corn crop isn’t looking great. Soggy spring weather in many parts of the Midwest delayed planting, and warmer-than-normal temperatures lately have been posing their own problems.1

Still, while the 13.8-billion-bushel corn harvest currently projected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture would be the smallest since 2015, it’s about 40% more than U.S. corn farmers were bringing in just two decades ago, and more than three times the average harvest in the 1960s.