Corn Production By State

• Iowa grows the most corn of any state, about 2.6 billion bushels in 2024.
• West Virginia reports the least among states that grow it, about 2.9 million bushels.
• Iowa alone accounts for roughly one in six bushels of all reported US corn, and out-produces the fourth-ranked state by about two to one.
• The biggest cattle state, Texas, ranks only 14th in corn: where the country grows corn and where it raises cattle are largely different places.

Iowa is the country's corn engine, producing about 2.6 billion bushels in 2024, with Illinois close behind at roughly 2.3 billion. Between them, those two states grow close to a third of all the corn the dataset reports, and Nebraska follows at about 1.8 billion. At the other end, states that grow corn at all bottom out near 3 million bushels, the level reported by West Virginia.

The figures come from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service, which estimates corn-for-grain production through in-field Objective Yield surveys that count ears and measure grain weight in sampled plots. The agency's 2024 crop summary put national corn-for-grain output near 14.9 billion bushels, and the states in this ranking account for the bulk of it. This ranking measures total volume harvested, not how much corn a state squeezes from each acre, so leading the table reflects scale of planting and harvest, not per-acre efficiency. Only 41 states report grain corn at all, and the nine that do not, including most of New England, simply sit outside the country's corn-growing band.

National production totals hide just how lopsided the map is. The five biggest states, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Minnesota and Indiana, together grow about 61% of all the corn in the ranking, which means those five out-produce the other 36 reporting states put together. The typical state in the dataset grows only around 81 million bushels, a rounding error next to Iowa's haul.

That concentration is a story about dirt. The Corn Belt sits on deep, fertile soils rich in organic material and nitrogen on relatively level land, a natural endowment that no policy can relocate. The regional gap the data shows is enormous: Midwestern states average roughly 1.1 billion bushels each, while the South, the Northeast and the West each average under 75 million per state. A single average Midwestern state grows more corn than fifteen average Southern states.

This is why the question of which state grows the most corn has a stable answer year after year. The leaders are not winning a close race; they are farming the best ground for it, in a contiguous block that runs from the Dakotas down through Iowa and Illinois.

It is tempting to assume the big corn states are also the big cattle states, since corn is the feed that fattens American beef. The data says otherwise. Across the 41 states with both figures, corn output and cattle numbers barely move together at all, and the relationship is too weak to be statistically reliable.

The clearest proof is Texas, which runs the largest cattle herd in the country at about 12.2 million head yet ranks only 14th in corn. Illinois is the mirror image: the second-largest corn producer, but near the bottom of the cattle rankings. The split is no accident. Cattle feeding began in the Corn Belt but shifted to the drier Great Plains in the 1950s and 1960s, where most US cattle are now fed, with southwestern Kansas a particular hub. Corn is simply railed to where the cattle are.

The takeaway is that corn output is a geography of soil, not of livestock. The states at the top of this ranking earn their place in the field, not in the feedlot.