agriculture Crop Yield Converter (bu/ac, t/ha) star

How It's Calculated

Yield conversion links two different kinds of unit: an area (acre, hectare, decare) and either a weight (kg, ton) or, for American reports, a volume-based bushel whose weight depends on the crop. The area part is pure arithmetic — 1 hectare = 10 decares = 2.471 acres — but the bushel part needs a crop-specific test weight: 60 lb for wheat and soybeans, 56 lb for corn, 48 lb for barley, 32 lb for oats.

Worked example: a US wheat report of 60 bu/ac converts as 60 × 60 lb = 3,600 lb/ac = 1,632.9 kg/ac; dividing by 0.4047 ha/ac gives roughly 4,034 kg/ha, i.e. 4.03 t/ha. Run the same 60 bu/ac through barley's lighter 48 lb test weight and the result drops to about 3.23 t/ha — same bushel count, different crop, a 20% smaller ton figure purely from the weight difference.

What to Know

• Yield ratios matter more than totals. Comparing raw harvest totals between two farms is misleading if the plots are different sizes — a large field with mediocre yield and a small field with excellent yield can produce the same total tonnage while representing very different farming efficiency, input cost per unit of output, and land productivity.
• Always check which "ton" and which area unit a report uses. Metric tons (1,000 kg) and US short tons (907 kg) differ by about 10%; confusing them, or mixing decare-based Turkish figures with hectare-based European ones without converting, is the most common source of yield numbers that look "10× too high or low."
• Bushel weights are legally defined test weights (historically based on a Winchester bushel of 35.24 liters), not universal physical constants — always match the crop before trusting a bu/ac to t/ha conversion.
• Reference points: world average wheat yield is near 3.5 t/ha; top Western European wheat farms exceed 9 t/ha; US corn averages roughly 175 bu/ac (about 11 t/ha).
• Yield alone doesn't tell you about profitability. A high-yield crop grown with heavy irrigation, fertilizer and pesticide input can cost more per unit of output than a moderate-yield crop grown with fewer inputs — agronomists and farm economists therefore pair yield figures with input-cost-per-hectare data before drawing conclusions about which approach is actually more efficient.