# Looking back at the causes of 25-year crop yield stagnation in Europe

Alain Vidal

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Alain Vidal. Looking back at the causes of 25-year crop yield stagnation in Europe. Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France, 2023, 17 (2), pp.1-10. 10.58630/pubac.not.a619313. hal-04811151

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# Notes Académiques
de l'Académie d'agriculture de France

## Academic Notes
of the French Academy of agriculture

### Authors

Alain Vidal

### Title of the work

Looking back at the causes of 25-year crop yield stagnation in Europe

Year 2023, Volume 17, Number 2, pp. 1-10

### Published online:

16 January 2023,

https://www.academie-agriculture.fr/publications/notes-academiques/opinion-looking-back-causes-25-year-crop-yield-stagnation-europe

Looking back at the causes of 25-year crop yield stagnation in Europe © 2024 by Alain Vidal is
licensed under Attribution 4.0 International [CC BY](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>
# Retour sur les causes de 25 ans de stagnation des rendements agricoles en Europe

# Looking back at the causes of 25-year crop yield stagnation in Europe

Alain Vidal¹

1 AgroParisTech, Département SIAFEE, 22 place de l'Agronomie, 91120 Palaiseau
(France)

Correspondance : alain.vidal@agroparistech.fr

## Résumé

Les rendements des cultures dans le monde, mais surtout en Europe, stagnent depuis le milieu des années 1990, quand sont apparues des inflexions dans l'évolution des rendements du blé, du maïs et de l'orge. Nous revenons ici sur les causes les plus probables de cette stagnation. Si les rendements agricoles avaient suivi la tendance 1950-1990 en Europe, ils seraient aujourd'hui 20 % supérieurs à ceux des années 1990, lorsqu'ils ont commencé à stagner. Le changement climatique explique raisonnablement un tiers de la différence. Des recherches récentes montrent qu'une plus grande diversité des cultures permet de maintenir les rendements plus efficacement que la monoculture, sans estimer dans quelle proportion. Enfin la littérature indique que la fourniture de services écosystémiques pourrait contribuer à stopper cette stagnation, mais sans encore en quantifier le potentiel.

## Abstract

Across the world, but especially in Europe, staple crop yields have been stagnating since the mid-1990s, when breakpoints appeared in wheat, maize, and barley yield evolution. We look back here at recent evidence about the most likely causes for crop yield stagnation. If crop yields had followed the 1950-1990 trend in Europe, they would now be 20% higher than in the 1990s, when they started stagnating. Climate change reasonably explains one third of the difference. Recent research shows that increased crop diversity sustains crop yields more effectively than monoculture, but there is to date no estimate in the literature by how much. Finally, the literature suggests that the provision of ecosystem services could help break up crop yield stagnation but to an extent that is not yet quantified.
Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France
Academic Notes from the French Academy of Agriculture
(N3AF)
Point de vue

Mots-clés

stagnation des rendements, Europe, changement climatique, monoculture, services écosystémiques

Keywords

yield stagnation, Europe, climate change,
monoculture, ecosystem services

Introduction

All across the world, average staple crop yields
have been stagnating or collapsing since the mid-
1990s, with a few exceptions (Figure 1), and this
started being analyzed and documented in the
early 2010s, with variations among regions and
crops (Grassini et al., 2013; Ray et al., 2012).

This was particularly observed in Europe (Brisson
et al., 2010), with obvious breakpoints in wheat,
maize and barley yield evolutions appearing in
most European countries in the 1990s (Figure 2)
(Wiesmeier et al., 2015). It was difficult to identify
such breakpoints before, as up to 18 years of
stagnation were necessary until a statistically
significant yield plateau could be detected
(Grassini et al., 2013).

The causes of such stagnation have not yet been
comprehensively analyzed or understood. A recent
literature, strongly calling for further research on
causes (Schauberger et al., 2018) reviews those
and mentions six elements, which we ranked here
by decreasing causal impacts (in italics below):

1. further increase in crop yields limited by climate change without adequate adaptation (most likely for all crops),

2. decrease in crop diversity (increasing monoculture) and soil carbon content (likely),

3. marginal costs for management interventions reaching a balance where further investment in production is limited (likely),

4. physiological yield potential possibly reaching a limit (likely for wheat),

5. political decisions (e.g., European Common Agricultural Policy) contributing to lower investment in breeding or a decrease in input use (unlikely),

6. increase of relative area share in favor of crops

grown under organic or regenerative agriculture
(Vidal, 2023), leading to yield stagnation as
resulting yields are usually lower than those
under conventional agriculture (unlikely).

Simultaneously, a research observing the 20-year
crop yield stagnation, by the think tank Institut du
développement durable et des relations
internationales (IDDRI) argued that such
stagnation may be mostly due to the loss of
ecosystem services in monoculture systems
under conventional agriculture (Poux and Aubert,
2018). A more recent study conducted in
Germany on the impact of regenerative
agriculture (which has long been associated with
lower yields) on winter wheat, barley, and
rapeseed even showed yield increases attributed
to improved ecosystem services, in addition to
avoiding yield losses under drought (Kurth et al.,
2023).

We therefore explore in this article recent
evidence about three of the most likely causes for
crop yield stagnation in Europe, namely, climate
change, decreases in crop diversity, and loss of
ecosystem services (including soil carbon
content), to help explore alternative approaches
to conventional agriculture, namely those that
seek to regenerate ecosystem services (Vidal,
2023).

The role of climate

There are quite consistent figures about global
average crop yield decreases as a function of
temperature increase, typically: -6% °C⁻¹ for
wheat, -3% °C⁻¹ for rice and soybean, -7% °C⁻¹ for
maize, with of course regional variations
(Anderson et al., 2020; Asseng et al., 2014;
Bassu et al., 2014; lizumi et al., 2017; Liu et al.,
2016; Zhao et al., 2017).

Figure 3 illustrates the ranges of temperature impact on average crop yields as estimated with five different models (A) and under four different scenarios for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Based on field experiments, it remains unclear
whether the main driver is the increase in
Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France
Academic Notes from the French Academy of Agriculture
(N3AF)
Point de vue

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1. Trends in grain yield of the three major cereal crops for selected regions since the start of the green revolution in the 1960s (Grassini et al., 2013). Fitted model for each crop region case is indicated in parenthesis: L, linear; QP, quadratic plateau; PW, piecewise with (+) increasing or (-) decreasing rate after breakpoint year; LUP or LLP, linear with upper or lower plateau; EXP, compound exponential.</figcaption></figure>

temperature or atmospheric CO₂ concentrations
(Bloom and Plant, 2021). Hence, with an average
increase of +1 °C in continental areas since the
1980s, one can reasonably use those figures as

the average climate change contribution to
average yield stagnation. This means that, in
Europe, if yields of barley and wheat had followed
the 1950-1990 trend (Figure 2), their yields would
Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France
Academic Notes from the French Academy of Agriculture
(N3AF)
Point de vue

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2. Evolution of wheat and barley yields in Germany and France between 1961 and 2013, as examples for stagnating yield trends in Europe since the 1990s. LUP, x<sub>B</sub> and R<sub>2</sub> mean respectively linear model with an upper plateau, breakpoint year, correlation coefficient (Wiesmeier et al., 2015).</figcaption></figure>

now be 20% higher, one third being explained by
climate change. Although the above remains a
simplistic calculation, it seems very unlikely that
climate alone could explain the stagnation of
average crop yields in Europe.

The role of decreased crop diversity

Decrease in crop diversity was one of the causes
identified in 2010 in a study of wheat yields
stagnation in Europe, showing that 10% of

leguminous crops were replaced by rape in crop
rotations, which depressed the yields of the
following wheat crop by 0.035 t.ha⁻¹.yr⁻¹ on
average (Brisson *et al.*, 2010). Reciprocally, a
large modelling study based on five decades of
data on annual yields of 176 crop species in 91
countries showed that greater diversity of crops
at the national level may increase the year-to-
year stability of the total national harvest of all
crops combined (Renard and Tilman, 2019).

A more comprehensive and recent review
(Tamburini et al., 2020) of 98 meta-analyses
Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France
Academic Notes from the French Academy of Agriculture
(N3AF)
Point de vue

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

B

<table><thead><tr><th rowspan="2">Scenario</th><th colspan="5">Yield changes (%) due to temperature changes by the end of century</th></tr><tr><th>Wheat</th><th>Rice</th><th>Maize</th><th>Soybean</th><th>Mean</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>RCP2.6</td><td>-6.9<br>[-15.0, -1.4]</td><td>-3.3<br>[-9.2, 0.8]</td><td>-8.6<br>[-18.6, -1.8]</td><td>-3.6<br>[-11.2, 1.7]</td><td>-5.6<br>[-14.4, -0.1]</td></tr><tr><td>RCP4.5</td><td>-11.4<br>[-21.7, -3.9]</td><td>-5.5<br>[-13.8, 1.0]</td><td>-14.2<br>[-27.9, -4.9]</td><td>-5.9<br>[-17.0, 3.1]</td><td>-9.2<br>[-21.2, -0.3]</td></tr><tr><td>RCP6.0</td><td>-14.0<br>[-25.7, -5.1]</td><td>-6.8<br>[-16.8, 1.3]</td><td>-17.4<br>[-33.1, -5.8]</td><td>-7.2<br>[-20.2, 3.6]</td><td>-11.3<br>[-25.6, 0.1]</td></tr><tr><td>RCP8.5</td><td>-22.4<br>[-40.2, -8.5]</td><td>-10.8<br>[-25.3, 2.4]</td><td>-27.8<br>[-50.4, -9.7]</td><td>-11.6<br>[-31.0, 6.0]</td><td>-18.2<br>[-38.6, -0.7]</td></tr></tbody></table>

**Figure 3.** Multimethod estimates of global crop yield changes in response to temperature increase (Zhao et al., 2017). (A) Impacts on crop yields of a 1 °C increase in global temperature in grid-based simulations (Grid-Sim), point-based simulations (Point-Sim), field-warming experiments (Point-Obs), and statistical regressions at the country level (Regres_A) and the global level (Regres_B), (B) Projected changes in yield due to temperature changes by the end of the 21st century.

based on 6167 original studies (published between 2010 and 2018 and covering the different regions of the world) explored in detail the impact of various practices fostering crop yield and biodiversity in agriculture. The practices analyzed included: crop diversification, addition of non-crop habitats within or around the field or in the surrounding landscape, organic amendment, inoculation of microorganisms into the soil, reduced tillage, and organic farming. It showed

that, whereas the impact on crop yields is quite neutral when considering all practices analyzed, crop diversification from 111 published comparisons with monoculture has many positive impacts, most notably on crop yields (Figure 4). These results tend to confirm that increased crop diversity sustains crop yields more effectively than monoculture, but there is to date no estimate in the literature by how much.

## The role of ecosystem services loss

As of today, there is only indirect and limited evidence that a significant part of yield stagnation is caused by the loss of various (and adding or multiplying up) ecosystem services.

A first explanation was given through the bidirectional interaction between stagnating crop yields and decreasing soil organic content (SOC), which is known to be a good proxy for below ground biodiversity: stagnating crop yields tend to decrease SOC, but in turn, decreasing SOC limits

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

**Figure 4.** Number of reported effect sizes (number of studies comparing crop diversification with monoculture) with a significant positive (green), negative (red), or neutral (gray) response to crop diversification of agronomic and nature variables indicated along the x-axis (Tamburini et al., 2020).
yields, with the latter being mostly due to climate
change, deeper tillage, land use change and
replacement of organic fertilization by chemical
fertilization along with the decrease in livestock,
hence the decrease in application of farmyard
manure (Wiesmeier et al., 2015). Hence, not
surprisingly, climate change also acts through the
loss of ecosystem services sustaining crop yields,
but more research is needed to separate its effect
from other ecosystem services. Indeed, all
ecosystem services are affected by climate
change: the Intergovernmental Platform on
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)
estimated that climate change would be
responsible for 1/6 of the loss of terrestrial
ecosystem services (Díaz et al., 2019).

Many authors have shown the benefits of a higher
density of semi-natural habitat (SNH) and
increased agricultural landscape complexity in
providing essential ecosystem services, in
particular biotic pest control, pollination and
nutrient cycling (DeClerck et al., 2023; Garibaldi et
al., 2018, 2020; Montoya et al., 2019; Tscharntke
et al., 2012), but their contributions to higher (and
not stagnating) yields seem to remain context
specific.

A meta-analysis synthesizing data from 49 studies covering 1515 landscapes across Europe showed that higher semi-natural habitat (SNH) and edge density increased crop yields, thanks to improved pest control and pollination ecosystem services, and suggested that lack of provision of such services "may underpin the risks of ongoing conventional intensification resulting in yield stagnation or reduction despite high agricultural inputs" (Martin et al., 2019).

A more recent and broader study explored the
synergies and trade-offs between biodiversity and
yield from 43 studies made in 18 countries across
the world and observed win-win outcomes for
biodiversity and yield in only 23% of cases (Jones
et al., 2023). Such outcomes were more likely in
temperate climates when combining multiple crop
and landscape diversification and using no
agrochemicals.

There is hence no clear evidence or quantification
on how the provision of ecosystem services

through higher semi-natural habitat and edge
density (typical features of “land sharing”
approaches), namely, biotic pest control,
pollination and nutrient cycling, could contribute
to breaking up the on-going crop yield stagnation
and help crop yields start growing again.

Conclusions

In this article, we explored recent evidence about
three of the most likely causes for crop yield
stagnation in Europe, namely, climate change,
decrease in crop diversity, and loss of ecosystem
services (including soil carbon content), to help
explore alternative approaches to conventional
agriculture, namely those seeking to regenerate
ecosystem services.

If crop yields had followed the 1950-1990 trend in Europe, they would now be 20% higher than in the 1990s, when they started stagnating. Climate change reasonably explains one-third of this difference. For crop diversification, the literature tends to confirm that increased crop diversity sustains crop yields more effectively than monoculture, but there is to date no estimate in the literature by how much. Finally, the literature suggests that the provision of ecosystem services through increased semi-natural habitat, namely, biotic pest control, pollination, nutrient cycling and particularly soil organic carbon, could help break up crop yield stagnation, but it does not yet quantify enough by how much and which would be the best practices in which context.

These issues are worth further research to
provide a strong science-based alternative to
conventional agriculture. Unfortunately, research
for regenerative and organic agriculture has been
much less funded in Europe than for conventional
agriculture over the past decades: between 1998
and 2013, the amount spent on biotechnology
increased from 20 to 70% of the total agricultural
research budget, whereas funding for research
into organic farming did not exceed 12% (Baret et
al., 2015). The changes that the European "Farm
to Fork Strategy" calls for will require a much
stronger budget for research on the relationships
between agriculture and biodiversity to avoid
unintended consequences on both crop yields and
the environment and eventually offer better options
to farmers.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has now constituted a database gathering information from 48 countries where diversified farming systems effectively contribute to biodiversity and food production outcomes (Jones et al., 2021) that could be a good starting point for further research on understanding continued crop yield stagnation in Europe.

Aknowledgements

This article has been conducted as part of the One
Planet Business for Biodiversity (OP2B) coalition
project of the World Business Council for
Sustainable Development (WBCSD). It benefited
from suggestions provided by Boston Consulting
Group (BCG) as one of the OP2B members.

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Rubrique

Cet article a été publié dans la rubrique « Points de vue » des *Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France*.

Éditeur :

Pere Arus, chercheur émérite à l'IRTA, du Centre
de Recerca en Agrigenòmica CSIC-IRTA-UAB-UB
(CRAG)

Rapporteurs :

1. Gilles Lemaire, membre de l'Académie d'agriculture de France

2. Anonyme

Reçu

6 mars 2023

Accepté

9 décembre 2023

Publié

16 janvier 2024

Citation

Vidal A. 2023. Looking back at the causes of 25-year crop yield stagnation in Europe, *Notes Académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France / Academic Notes from the French Academy of Agriculture (N3AF)*, 17(2), 1-10.

DOI: 10.58630/pubac.not.a619313.

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Alain Vidal est professeur consultant AgroParisTech, conseiller biodiversité chez Quantis, et conseiller scientifique de la coalition OP2B.