![\"Source:](\"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/fao.png\")
<\/a>Source: Dimensions of Need: An atlas of food and agriculture, FAO, 1995<\/p><\/div>\n
It takes 33 crop entries in the FAO database to account for 90% of global production, of which at 5 of those entries include multiple species.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Global production (MT), Source: FAO Statistics<\/p><\/div>\n
Worse, different datasets collect information on different crops. Outside of the big three, there’s a Wild West of agriculture data to dissect. What’s a scientist to do?<\/p>\n
The first step is to reduce the number of categories, to more than 2 (grains, other) and less than 252. By comparing the categories used by the FAO and the USDA, and also considering categories for major datasets I use, like the MIRCA2000 harvest areas and the Sacks crop calendar (and using a share of tag-sifting code to be a little objective), I came up with 10 categories:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Cereals (wheat and rice)<\/li>\n
- Coarse grains (not wheat and rice)<\/li>\n
- Oilcrops<\/li>\n
- Vegetables (including miscellaneous annuals)<\/li>\n
- Fruits (including miscellaneous perennials– plants that “bear fruit”)<\/li>\n
- Actives (spices, psychoactive plants)<\/li>\n
- Pulses<\/li>\n
- Tree nuts<\/li>\n
- Materials (and decoratives)<\/li>\n
- Feed<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
You can download the crop-by-crop (and other dataset category) mapping, currently as a PDF: A Crop Taxonomy<\/a><\/p>\n
Still, most of these categories admit further division: fruits into melons, citrus, and non-citrus; splitting out the subcategory of caffeinated drinks from the actives category. What we need is a treemap for a cropmap! The best-looking maps I could make were using the R treemap<\/tt> package, shown below with rectangles sized by their global harvest area.<\/p>\n
![\"treemap\"](\"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/treemap.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nYou can click through a more interactive version<\/a>, using Google’s treemap library.<\/p>\n
What does the world look like, with these categories? Here, it is colored by which category the majority production crop falls into:<\/p>\n