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Arkansas Farmers Have More Corn on Their Plate

3 min read

Kernel Corn has overtaken King Cotton as Arkansas’ third most popular crop by land use, and the state now has more acres producing corn than it has had at almost any time in the past 70 years.

While still considerably trailing soybeans and rice in the state’s crop hierarchy, corn is growing on about 850,000 acres of Arkansas farmland this season compared with about 490,000 acres of cotton.

“When you drive around, yes, you see a lot more corn than you once did,” said Jason P. Kelley, an associate professor, extension agronomist and wheat and feed grains specialist at the University of Arkansas’ Cooperative Extension Service in Little Rock. “To give some historical perspective, our highest acreage count in recent times was in 1954 when 890,000 acres were planted,” Kelley told Arkansas Business.

“In the years that followed it dropped off to nearly nothing,” the professor said, surmising that fewer row crop farmers continued to keep livestock in the postwar years, removing an incentive for planting corn as a feed resource for their own animals. “If you no longer had mules to feed, that was a good reason to grow cash crops like cotton instead of corn.”

But over the past quarter century, corn acreage has been creeping up, and in the past five years maize has outpaced cotton. Soybeans are still No. 1, planted on about 3 million acres in Arkansas. Rice commands 1.2 million acres this year, down about 17% from last year.

“The long story short is that this is the second-most corn acreage in Arkansas since 1954,” Kelley said. “Most of the additional corn acreage has come from fields that used to be planted in cotton.”

Three factors have fed the surge in corn acreage, Kelley said: price, weather and improving yields.

Jason P. Kelley

“With any crop, of course, farmers are looking for a good market price, and when corn gets over $5 to $6 a bushel, those grain prices are attractive,” Kelley said. “With corn, we also say we like to plant it early, getting it in by the end of April. Of course that’s the time of year when we face a lot of ups and downs with the weather. This year, for the most part and in most areas, we had a pretty good planting window.”

Arkansas will never rival Midwestern states like Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Minnesota in corn production. In fact, all of Arkansas’ cropland, more than 7 million acres, is dwarfed by Iowa’s 13.5 million acres of corn. Illinois and Nebraska follow at 10.5 million and 10.1 million acres.

But the crop does offer benefits to Arkansas farmers, who have consistently been improving their yields.

“Along with a good price and relatively good planting conditions, our producers have come a really long way in improving yields,” Kelley said. “This year we’re estimated to have an average yield of 182 bushels an acre, and that’s a lot of corn.” That yield even beats Iowa, the Corn State, which is looking at a 178-bushel average this year.

“The yield in Arkansas has been improving steadily, throwing out the highs and the lows, by about two and a half bushels per acre per year.”

Kelley said Arkansas farmers have mastered growing corn, and working it into their multiyear crop rotation practices. “They know what they’re doing, and they found benefits from corn as the fields are rotated over to other crops.”


Arkansas Crop Acres Planted

 

2020

2021

Percent Change

Soybeans

2,820,000

3,050,000

+8.2%

Corn

620,000

850,000

+37.1%

Peanuts

39,000

45,000

+15.3%

Rice

1,461,000

1,216,000

-16.8%

Cotton

525,000

490,000

-9.5%

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service
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