Our World
in Data
Oxford Martin School logoUniversity of Oxford logoGlobal Change Data Lab logo
Data

Fertilizer use per hectare of cropland

FAO
See all data and research on:
Agricultural Production

About this data

Fertilizer use per hectare of cropland
FAO
Agricultural use of all fertilizer products (including nitrogenous, potash, and phosphate fertilizers) per area of cropland, which corresponds to the sum of arable land and permanent crops.
Source
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
February 25, 2026
Next expected update
February 2027
Date range
1961–2023
Unit
kilograms per hectare

Related research and writing

Thumnbail

How effective are policies in reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture?

Hannah Ritchie

Can we reduce fertilizer use without sacrificing food production?

Hannah Ritchie

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations – Land, Inputs and Sustainability: Fertilizers by Nutrient

The Fertilizers by Nutrient dataset contains information on the totals in nutrients for Production, Trade and Agriculture Use of inorganic (chemical or mineral) fertilizers, over the time series 1961-2023.

The data are provided for the three primary plant nutrients: nitrogen (N), phosphorus (expressed as P2O5) and potassium (expressed as K2O). Both straight and compound fertilizers are included.

There is information on the methodology available at: https://files-faostat.fao.org/production/RFN/RFN_EN_README.pdf

Retrieved on
February 25, 2026
Retrieved from
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/RFN
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: Fertilizers by Nutrient (2025).

The Fertilizers by Nutrient dataset contains information on the totals in nutrients for Production, Trade and Agriculture Use of inorganic (chemical or mineral) fertilizers, over the time series 1961-2023.

The data are provided for the three primary plant nutrients: nitrogen (N), phosphorus (expressed as P2O5) and potassium (expressed as K2O). Both straight and compound fertilizers are included.

There is information on the methodology available at: https://files-faostat.fao.org/production/RFN/RFN_EN_README.pdf

Retrieved on
February 25, 2026
Retrieved from
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/RFN
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: Fertilizers by Nutrient (2025).

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: Fertilizer use per hectare of cropland”, 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/fertilizer-use-per-hectare-of-cropland.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) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Fertilizer use per hectare of cropland – FAO” [dataset]. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Land, Inputs and Sustainability: Fertilizers by Nutrient” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/fertilizer-use-per-hectare-of-cropland.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

Download

Quick download

Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

Download full data

Includes all entities and time points

Download displayed data

Includes only the entities and time points currently visible in the chart

Data API

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/fertilizer-use-per-hectare-of-cropland.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertilizer-use-per-hectare-of-cropland.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/fertilizer-use-per-hectare-of-cropland.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/fertilizer-use-per-hectare-of-cropland.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/fertilizer-use-per-hectare-of-cropland.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertilizer-use-per-hectare-of-cropland.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

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