Heat and drought reduce French corn harvest

France’s grain maize output is set to decline this season, according to Agreste. Unfavourable summer weather and drought reduced yields despite a larger growing area. Other crops show mixed results, with strong rebounds for cereals but sharp declines for fodder corn and sorghum.

French farmers are expected to harvest 13.5 million tons of grain maize this season, agricultural statistics service Agreste says. That would be 7.5% down on 2024, due to a decline in the yield per hectare from 9.55 tons last year to 8.74 tons in the current season, partly compensated by a larger area. The lower yield comes after a summer of unfavourable weather conditions with long heatwaves and droughts. This year´s production is still almost 1% higher than the 5-year average, Agreste notes.

As for fodder corn, Agreste calculates the production at 15 million tons, a decline of 13% compared to 2024 but almost 9% under the average over the previous 5 years too. While the area for this crop is almost stable, the yield per hectare declined from 13.5 tons to 12.3 tons. Although the agriculture service doesn´t give any specifics for this crop, it can be assumed that the hot weather played its part here too.

Furthermore, farmers in France seem to have lost interest in sorghum, leading to a decrease of the area from 100,000 hectares in the previous season to just 63,000 hectares now. In combination with a slightly lower yield per hectare, total production of sorghum is down over 33% to just over 300,000 tons.

Another crop that didn´t fare that well was sunflowers, one of the most characteristic plants in the summerly French countryside. The harvest is expected to reach 1.5 million tons, just 1.7% less than in 2024 however already 18% under the 5 year average, with a significantly lower area in combination with a lower, be it regional variable, yield.

For all other cereals, the production figures are much higher than in the disastrously bad 2024 season. Soft wheat is expected to produce 33.2 million tons, 29% higher y-o-y, barley is predicted to have come in at almost 11.9 million tons, an increase of 21.5%, while oats at 475,000 tons is a strong 55% higher. Earlier in the season, over 14.6 million tons of rapeseed came of the fields, an y-o-y increase of 17.5%.

Tags: sunflowers, soft wheat, sorghum, grain maize, barley, France, drought, yields, rapeseed, crop, output