fivemack: (Default)
Tom Womack ([personal profile] fivemack) wrote2007-07-01 08:37 pm

All the wheat-related statistics you can want

The FAO wheat site offers one page per country, so I've taken the transpose to produce the table below.

One ton per hectare is 9.5 bushels per acre, these are figures from 2000.

It has been pointed out that they're in intercalated alphabetical order, which is in almost no case the right order to use. You can pick them up more usefully at Google Spreadsheet.



kilotonssq kmyield (tons per hectare)
Albania33013202.5
Austria131329384.5
Belarus95042502.2
Bosnia258822.53.1
Croatia108024004.5
Denmark470063607.4
Finland55015903.5
Georgia83.58131.0
Greece177085622.1
Ireland7068108.7
Latvia410.315802.6
Macedonia32011502.8
Netherlands118313838.6
Poland8276264003.1
Romania4320191002.3
Slovakia126640643.1
Spain7319237783.1
Switzerland62010006.2
UK16530210007.9
Belgium163422877.1
Bulgaria2800110002.5
Czech411697274.2
Estonia1476902.1
France37559526907.1
Germany21634297097.3
Hungary3709102423.6
Italy7464231773.2
Lithuania94232652.9
Moldova77032002.4
Norway2936004.9
Portugal42924901.7
Russia360001995201.8
Slovenia1503574.2
Sweden253040176.3
USA608002530002.4
China997002910003.4
India764002490003.1
Ukraine10159515152.0

In graphical form

[identity profile] del-c.livejournal.com 2007-07-01 09:44 pm (UTC)(link)
The blue lines should be equal kilotons, but I haven't troubled to work out what units they're in.

[identity profile] kaet.livejournal.com 2007-07-01 11:07 pm (UTC)(link)
That's an interestingly random set of figures. If we assume that wheat is easy to trade and pretty fungible, then it would make sense to grow it in places where the yields were highest, if costs were strongly dependent on yeild. There should be a scatter of dots (depending upon fertility) along some horizontal line somewhere near the middle of the graph.

Presumably high costs per yield push countries up the graph, and (incidentally) to the left [eg high labour costs] (so that fields with potential for lower-end yields are not profitable in those countries), whereas subsidies on production push the country down the graph and (incidentally) to the right.

It would be interesting to see [livejournal.com profile] del_c's graph with this line drawn on it: total square kilometerage (x) times yield (y) equals total world demand.