International Benchmarks for Corn Production

Examining the competitiveness of corn production in different regions of the world is often difficult due to lack of comparable data and agreement regarding what needs to be measured. To be useful, international data needs to be expressed in common production units and converted to a common currency. Also, production and cost measures need to be consistently defined across production regions or farms. This paper examines the competitiveness of corn production for important international corn regions using 2018 to 2022 data from the agri benchmark network. An earlier paper examined international benchmarks for the 2015 to 2019 period (Langemeier, 2021). The agri benchmark network collects data on beef, cash crops, dairy, pigs and poultry, horticulture, and organic products. There were 20 countries with corn, soybean, and/or wheat enterprise data for 2022 represented in the cash crop network. The agri benchmark concept of typical farms was developed to understand and compare current farm production systems around the world. Participant countries follow a standard procedure to create typical farms that are representative of national farm output shares, and categorized by production system or combination of enterprises and structural features. Costs and revenues are converted to U.S. dollars so that comparisons can be readily made. Data from six typical farms with corn enterprise data from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Ukraine, and United States were used in this paper. It is important to note that corn enterprise data is collected from other countries. These five countries were selected to simplify the illustration and discussion.