Ames, Iowa - The Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University has released the Long-Term Agricultural Outlook 2026, a renewed effort to provide transparent, model-based projections of possible long-run developments in global agriculture, food markets, land use, livestock production, and biofuels. The report marks the return of a CARD outlook series that was discontinued in 2011, but with an expanded purpose and a longer time horizon. Whereas earlier outlook reports focused on a 10-year period, the 2026 edition extends projections over 25 years, from 2025 to 2050. This longer time horizon is intended to better capture gradual but consequential changes shaping agriculture, including population growth, rising incomes, technological change, evolving food demand, and land-use transitions. Rather than presenting the projections as forecasts of what will happen, the report is designed as a structured baseline for thinking about what could happen under a consistent set of assumptions. The outlook emphasizes that long-term agricultural change is often incremental, shaped by macroeconomic drivers and evolving market relationships rather than sudden shifts. As such, the results are best interpreted as conditional scenarios that can help researchers, policymakers, industry participants, and other stakeholders evaluate long-run trends and policy-relevant questions. “This report is intended to serve as a coherent and evolving resource for assessing potential future trajectories of agricultural production, resource use, and sustainability,” the report states.
The modeling framework has been updated to reflect current data, market structures, and policy contexts, while also creating a foundation for future improvements and expansions. The 2026 outlook covers major field crops, oilseed products, livestock products, and biofuels. Commodities examined include corn, rice, soybeans, wheat, soybean meal, soybean oil, beef, broiler meat, pork, ethanol, and biomass-based diesel. Results are reported in five-year intervals, with the full data and a visualization tool (https://www.card.iastate.edu/tools/long-run-land-use-outlook) made available as part of the outlook.
While the report includes projections of production, consumption, trade, prices, and land use, CARD emphasizes that the central contribution of the outlook is not any single projection. Instead, the report provides a long-term analytical framework for evaluating how global agricultural systems may evolve under changing economic, demographic, and environmental conditions. The report also highlights the importance of uncertainty in long-term analysis. CARD cautions that projections depend on the data, methods, models, and assumptions used, and users should interpret the results with appropriate judgment. The outlook is intended to support decision-making, not replace it.
The Long-Term Agricultural Outlook 2026 is the first step in an ongoing process. CARD plans to update and expand the outlook in future years as new information becomes available, methods improve, and emerging issues become more central to agricultural and environmental policy discussions. The current outlook establishes a baseline, or reference case, for analyzing the potential impacts of alternative policy scenarios and market shocks on both national and global agricultural markets.
About CARD
For nearly 70 years, the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University has conducted innovative public policy and economic research on local, regional, and global agricultural issues, combining academic excellence with engagement and anticipatory thinking to inform and benefit society.
Through the Long-Term Agricultural Outlook, CARD aims to provide stakeholders with a transparent and consistent resource for understanding possible futures for agriculture and related markets.