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Data

Arable land needed to produce a fixed quantity of crops

FAO
See all data and research on:
Agricultural Production

What you should know about this indicator

  • Arable land is the total of areas (extent of surface of land or water) under temporary crops, temporary meadows and pastures, and land with temporary fallow. Arable land does not include land that is potentially cultivable but is not normally cultivated.
  • This is calculated as arable land divided by the crop production index (PIN). The crop production index is the sum of crop commodities produced after deductions of quantities used as seed and feed.
  • It is weighted by the commodity prices.
Arable land needed to produce a fixed quantity of crops
FAO
Index of arable land needed to produce a fixed quantity of crops (where values in 1961 are equal to 1.0).
Source
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025); Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
February 25, 2026
Next expected update
February 2027
Date range
1961–2023

Related research and writing

A dark blue background with a lighter blue world map superimposed over it. Yellow text that says Land Use by Our World in Data

Land Use

Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations – Land, Inputs and Sustainability: Land Use

The FAOSTAT Land Use domain contains data on twenty-one land use categories and twenty-three categories of irrigation and agricultural practices. Data are available yearly and by country, regional and global levels. The domain includes Land Use Indicators providing information on the percentage share of agricultural and forest land, and their sub-components, including irrigated areas and areas under organic agriculture, within a country land use matrix. Data are available at country, regional and global level, for the following elements: (in percentage) i) Share in Land area; ii) Share in Agricultural land, iii) Share in Cropland; and iv) Share in Forest land; (in ha/pc) v) Area per capita.

Retrieved on
February 25, 2026
Retrieved from
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/RL
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - Land, Inputs and Sustainability: Land Use (2025).

The FAOSTAT Land Use domain contains data on twenty-one land use categories and twenty-three categories of irrigation and agricultural practices. Data are available yearly and by country, regional and global levels. The domain includes Land Use Indicators providing information on the percentage share of agricultural and forest land, and their sub-components, including irrigated areas and areas under organic agriculture, within a country land use matrix. Data are available at country, regional and global level, for the following elements: (in percentage) i) Share in Land area; ii) Share in Agricultural land, iii) Share in Cropland; and iv) Share in Forest land; (in ha/pc) v) Area per capita.

Retrieved on
February 25, 2026
Retrieved from
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/RL
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - Land, Inputs and Sustainability: Land Use (2025).

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations – Production: Production Indices

The FAO indices of agricultural production show the relative level of the aggregate volume of agricultural production for each year in comparison with the base period 2014-2016. Indices for meat production are computed based on data on production from indigenous animals.

Retrieved on
February 25, 2026
Retrieved from
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QI
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - Production: Production Indices (2026).

The FAO indices of agricultural production show the relative level of the aggregate volume of agricultural production for each year in comparison with the base period 2014-2016. Indices for meat production are computed based on data on production from indigenous animals.

Retrieved on
February 25, 2026
Retrieved from
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QI
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - Production: Production Indices (2026).

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Arable land needed to produce a fixed quantity of crops”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2023) - “Agricultural Production”. Data adapted from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/arable-land-pin.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025); Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025); Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Arable land needed to produce a fixed quantity of crops – FAO” [dataset]. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Land, Inputs and Sustainability: Land Use”; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Production: Production Indices” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/arable-land-pin.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/arable-land-pin.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/arable-land-pin.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/arable-land-pin.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/arable-land-pin.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/arable-land-pin.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/arable-land-pin.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/arable-land-pin.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/arable-land-pin.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear