Grow It, and They Will Eat It. 

“Build it, and they will come” has been the motivation for many dreams. Baseball fields, restaurants, and other follies have sprouted from belief in this concept. Much of the real estate industry of times now past lived by this philosophy. That worked until they did not come, and then the bankers came for the remains.

In Agri-Food we have a similar motto: Grow it, and they will east it. We worry little about relying on such a belief, for people eating is, unlike baseball, not optional. That the world will eat it if it is grown can be observed in the following chart.

Note on chart: USDA works in crop years, not calendar years. At present we are in crop year 2014. That year runs from September 2013 through the end of August 2014. The current Northern Hemisphere harvest in process, which includes that now concluding in the U.S., is part of the data point for 2014 in the graph.

Plotted in the chart is percentage of the world’s total grain production that is consumed. That ratio is expressed as a percentage, and uses the right vertical axis. A solid black line highlights the 100% level which means that all of the world’s grain production is being consumed.

In the first three years plotted in the graph the world’s consumption of total grains produced averaged more than 100%. Essentially, over that period the world consumed all the grains produced plus some of that which had been stored from previous years. The value for 2013, the highest in the chart, is due in part to the drought which dramatically reduced U.S. grain production in the Fall of 2012.

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