For centuries, yields for crops like corn remained relatively steady.
Everything changed in the middle of the 20th century. Advances in synthetic fertilizers and strain selection and other tools of modern agriculture kicked off an ongoing period of immense growth in the output of agriculture. Worldwide gross output increased by 60 percent from 1938 to the late 1950s — since then, it has more than doubled again. Today, on average, the world produces nearly three times as much cereal grains as we could get from the same area of land in 1961. Since 1950, there has been a more than five-fold increase in overall corn yields in the United States alone.
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The next development that can spur growth to meet food demands may come from a lab striving to squeeze more yield from the standbys like corn, or it may come from somewhere totally unexpected. Innovation is often what sparks the growth, along with the formation of infrastructure and supply chains to support it. New fertilizers enable commodity-scale markets for crops like corn; smaller, faster computer chips enable a nearly complete worldwide distribution of computers; a newly studied organism creates the ability to produce novel enzymes, materials or chemicals that serve mass market needs far more sustainably than the status quo.
