America's Farm Exports

Five states out of fifty account for 37.2% of US agricultural export value. Stretch it to ten states and you are at 54.9%, past half the country’s farm exports concentrated in a fifth of its states. I went into the USDA’s 2011 state export table expecting a farm belt that blurred together, a smear of corn and soy across the middle of the map. I found a handful of specialized economies that happen to share a census category.

Plot the states as a ranked lollipop and the whole argument fits in one frame: a short amber head, a long sand tail, and California floating off on its own. Read the crop tags on the leaders, Fruit, Corn, Corn, Corn, Corn. The bars next to each other are not measuring the same thing.

The data is the USDA 2011 state agricultural exports table, via plotly/datasets, one row per state, 50 states, no DC. Each row carries a total export value in millions of dollars plus a breakdown into beef, pork, poultry, dairy, fruits, vegetables, corn, wheat, and cotton. I worked off the un-rolled product columns so the totals would not double-count the “total fruits”-style aggregates. National total across all states: $136.4 billion.

How lopsided is it, really

The Gini coefficient of total exports across the 50 states is 0.54. That is higher than the income inequality of most developed countries. Picture the states lined up shortest bar to tallest: the bottom half barely clears the floor while the top runs off the page. Alaska exports $13 million, a rounding error next to the leaders.

California sits alone at the top with $16.47 billion, 12.1% of the entire national figure by itself. The next state, Iowa, does $11.27 billion. So California out-exports the number-two state by 1.46x, and it does it with a completely different product mix. That is the part that surprised me. I had assumed the leader would just be a bigger version of everyone else. It is not.

The ranking makes the cliff obvious. California and Iowa stand apart, then a tight cluster of Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Texas, then a long gentle slope into the states that round to nothing. What the chart hides is that the clustered bars are not the same bar. Similar height, different crop.

Everybody has a signature

For each top state I found its signature product, the single category that is the largest slice of its own export basket. This is where the several-specialized-economies idea earns its keep.

California’s signature is fruit. Fruit is 64% of California’s own basket, and California alone supplies 62% of all US fruit exports. Iowa’s signature is corn at 51% of its basket, and Iowa is 19% of national corn exports. Texas breaks the pattern entirely: its signature is cotton, half its basket and 27% of the national cotton total. Kansas leans on wheat, 50% of its basket and 13% of the national wheat figure.

There is a corn cluster, no question. Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Indiana all name corn as their signature, and Illinois is the most corn-dependent of the bunch at 74% of its basket. The middle of the country really is a corn monoculture by export value. But California and Texas sit outside it, and they are the first- and sixth-largest exporters. The farm belt as a single thing is two corn-and-grain blocs, the Midwest and the wheat plains, plus a fruit-and-vegetable economy on the West Coast plus a cotton economy in Texas. One table, four different businesses.

The most concentrated crop in the country

Flip the question. Which single product is the most geographically concentrated? The answer is fruit, and it is not close. California holds 62% of national fruit exports. One state, nearly two-thirds of the crop. The Gini for fruit across states is 0.90, about as concentrated as a product can get short of a literal single-state monopoly.

Vegetables are next, again California, at 36%. Then pork, where Iowa holds 31%. Cotton sits at 27% in Texas. Corn, the crop everyone associates with concentration, is one of the more spread-out products: Iowa’s 19% share leads, but corn is grown for export across a dozen states, so no single one dominates the way California dominates fruit. The crop that feels like the symbol of American agriculture is, by this measure, the democratic one. The bottle of California wine and the bag of California almonds are the monopoly.

One honest caveat, and it matters. This is a 2011 snapshot, a single year, and it is export value in dollars, not physical production or tonnage. A high-value, low-volume crop like tree fruit punches above its weight against bulk grain measured this way, and that is part of why California looks so dominant. Prices in 2011 were what they were; a different year reshuffles the cluster around the edges. I would not bet the exact percentages hold today. But the shape, a few states each with its own signature, a fruit economy that is basically one state, is structural enough to survive a decade of price swings.

So the next time someone talks about “the farm vote” or “farm country” as one bloc, ask them which farm. Iowa’s corn and California’s almonds are not in the same business, and the data does not even pretend they are.