Reviewed August 2026 against USDA NASS Colorado statistics, USDA NASS Quick Stats, and the USDA NASS national Crop Production summary.

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Agriculture in Colorado: The Numbers That Matter

Colorado agriculture is a mid-sized grain and livestock economy built around wheat, corn, and barley on the Eastern Plains, irrigated with a mix of surface water and groundwater that is under mounting pressure. In 2023, Colorado produced 123.83 million bushels of corn for grain at an average yield of 122.0 bushels per acre, 74.62 million bushels of winter wheat, and 6.68 million bushels of barley, according to USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) Colorado office. Those are the figures behind the headline query “agriculture in Colorado” — not a generic description of dryland farming, but the actual bushels the state put in the bin.

This article does two things. First, it lays out Colorado’s production numbers commodity by commodity, with sources you can check yourself. Second, it answers the broader “agriculture output by state” question by placing Colorado next to Iowa — the state that actually leads in corn and soybeans — so you can see where Colorado fits in the national picture rather than assuming it competes at the top of every category.

Colorado’s Crop Output, Commodity by Commodity

Colorado’s Eastern Plains — Weld, Yuma, Kit Carson, and Morgan counties chief among them — carry most of the state’s grain production, while irrigated corners of the South Platte and Arkansas River valleys support higher-intensity row-crop farming than the drier southeastern counties. The most recent full-year figures published by USDA NASS Colorado, covering the 2023 crop year, are:

These are the numbers worth quoting when someone asks about “agriculture in Colorado” in a factual sense — not adjectives like “significant” or “major,” but the actual bushels. What the public NASS Colorado summary does not break out is planted acreage by commodity, gross crop value in dollars, or an irrigated-versus-dryland acreage split. If you need those for a specific analysis, USDA NASS publishes them in its full state agricultural statistics bulletin and Quick Stats database — see the tracking section below for exactly where to pull them.

Colorado’s corn yield of 122.0 bushels per acre in 2023 sits well below the national average of 179.3 bushels per acre that USDA NASS reported for all US corn in 2024. That gap is not a farming-quality difference; it reflects Colorado’s semi-arid climate and the share of its corn acreage that depends on limited irrigation water rather than the reliable rainfall of the Corn Belt. We cover why that gap exists, and what narrows it, later in this article.

Agriculture Output by State: Where Colorado Ranks

“Agriculture output by state” is really a request for a same-commodity comparison, because no single number captures every crop and every state fairly — a state can lead in wheat and rank nowhere in soybeans. The clearest way to answer it is to place Colorado’s own numbers next to a Corn Belt state that dominates national output, so the scale difference is explicit rather than implied.

Iowa is the reference point here because it is the country’s largest corn and soybean producer. In 2024, Iowa produced 2.63 billion bushels of corn for grain at a yield of 211.0 bushels per acre, and 4.37 billion bushels of soybeans at 50.7 bushels per acre, according to USDA NASS Iowa’s Crop Production Annual summary. Iowa also counted 86,700 farm operations working roughly 30,000,000 acres of farmland in 2024, for an average farm size of 346 acres, per USDA NASS Quick Stats.

Two things follow from this table. First, Colorado is not competing with Iowa for corn volume — Iowa’s 2024 corn crop alone was more than 21 times the size of Colorado’s entire 2023 corn crop. Second, Colorado’s role in national agriculture output is centered on wheat and barley rather than corn and soybeans, which is exactly why the state’s numbers look small next to a Corn Belt state on a corn-only comparison and would look different again on a wheat-only one.

Which State Produces the Most Corn in the US?

Iowa is the United States’ largest corn-producing state, with 2.63 billion bushels harvested in 2024 at a yield of 211.0 bushels per acre — well above both Colorado’s 122.0 bushels per acre and the national average of 179.3 bushels per acre for that period, per USDA NASS. Nationally, US farmers produced 14.9 billion bushels of corn for grain in 2024, and USDA NASS’s forecast for the 2025 crop was 16.7 billion bushels at a projected yield of 188.8 bushels per acre. Iowa’s dominance comes from a combination of deep loess soils, reliable summer rainfall, and a farm base concentrated almost entirely on corn and soybeans — conditions Colorado’s semi-arid Eastern Plains do not share, which is why the two states play different roles in the national supply rather than competing head-to-head.

Which State Is Known as the Apple State?

Washington is the state most commonly called “the apple state,” producing an estimated 180 million bushels of apples in the 2025-26 crop year and accounting for roughly 60% of the entire US apple crop, according to the US Apple Association’s 2025-26 crop outlook and USDA’s Economic Research Service. New York, the next major producer, is forecast at 30.5 million bushels for the same crop year — under a fifth of Washington’s volume. Colorado’s own apple production is not among the figures tracked in USDA’s national apple outlook reports, so it is not part of this comparison; readers looking for Colorado-specific fruit acreage should check the USDA NASS Colorado statistics page directly, linked in the tracking section below.

Water and Yield: Why Colorado’s Numbers Look the Way They Do

The gap between Colorado’s 122.0 bushels-per-acre corn yield and the national 179.3 bushels-per-acre average in the same general period is not a soil-quality story — it is a water story. Corn is a crop that responds directly to water availability during silking and grain fill, and Colorado’s Eastern Plains receive far less growing-season rainfall than Iowa or the rest of the Corn Belt. Acreage on the South Platte and Arkansas River systems that gets full-season irrigation performs much closer to Corn Belt yields; acreage relying on limited groundwater allocations or dryland rotation performs well below it. USDA NASS’s public Colorado summary does not publish an irrigated-versus-dryland yield split, so the exact size of that gap by irrigation status is not something this article can state as a number — it is a genuine gap in the published data, not an oversight in this piece. A grower or analyst who needs that breakdown should check the irrigation section of the USDA Census of Agriculture for Colorado, which is compiled separately from the annual NASS crop reports.

This is also where satellite-based monitoring earns its place in a Colorado operation specifically, rather than as a generic add-on: with irrigation water being the binding constraint on yield rather than nitrogen or seed genetics, knowing which zones of a field are moisture-stressed before visible wilting appears is worth more in Colorado’s climate than in a rain-fed Iowa county.

Read about large-scale farm management tools built for multi-field operators who need to track irrigation status, planting windows, and compliance reporting across dispersed acreage rather than a single contiguous farm.

How to Track These Numbers Yourself, Every Season

Every figure in this article carries an expiration date, and that is by design — USDA NASS republishes state-level crop data on a fixed annual schedule, so a reader checking this page in 2027 should not be quoting 2023 Colorado numbers as current. Here is exactly where the refreshed figures land and when:

• ✔ State-specific annual bulletins: USDA NASS publishes each state’s complete prior-year crop production data — corn, wheat, barley, and other commodities — every autumn, typically September through November, on that state’s NASS statistics page.
• 📊 National Crop Production Summary: USDA NASS’s national report (the source for the 14.9 billion bushel and 179.3 bu/acre figures above) is released annually and updated with in-season forecasts through the growing year.
• 🍎 Apple crop outlook: USDA NASS forecasts the coming apple crop each Q4 for the following crop year, with the US Apple Association publishing the state-by-state breakdown in August–September.
• 📈 Farm counts and acreage: USDA NASS’s Quick Stats tool holds farm-operation counts, total acreage, and average farm size, refreshed on its own release calendar independent of the crop production bulletins.

The durable method, regardless of which year you’re reading this: go to the state’s NASS statistics page, find the most recent “Crop Production Annual Summary” PDF, and read the commodity table directly rather than trusting any secondhand figure — including the ones in this article a year or two after publication.

For context on how precision agriculture technology is being adopted alongside these traditional statistical sources, see this overview of the US precision farming market and key technologies.

Where Satellite Monitoring Fits Into the Picture

USDA’s annual bulletins tell you what happened at the state level months after harvest. They don’t tell a Colorado grower, mid-season, whether a specific 80-acre pivot corner is running short on water three weeks before it shows up in yield. That gap between statewide averages and field-level reality is where satellite crop monitoring is useful — not as a replacement for USDA data, but as the in-season layer sitting on top of it.

• ✔ Vegetation and moisture indices (NDVI, NDWI) flag stressed zones before visible wilting, which matters most on the irrigated-versus-dryland margin that drives Colorado’s yield variance.
• 🛰️ Field-level tracking across dispersed acreage helps multi-field operators — common on Colorado’s Eastern Plains, where a single operation can span several counties — manage irrigation timing without a truck trip to every pivot.

Farmonaut’s platform delivers these indices via satellite-based crop monitoring, alongside API and developer documentation for building custom irrigation or yield-risk dashboards, and an API for direct integration into existing farm management systems.

Beyond irrigation, operations tracking their environmental footprint alongside production can use carbon footprinting tools to measure emissions per bushel, and multi-field operators moving grain and inputs across a dispersed footprint like Colorado’s Eastern Plains can use fleet management tools to track logistics. For buyers or lenders who need to verify where a bushel of corn or wheat actually originated, product traceability tools provide input-to-harvest verification, and crop loan and insurance services connect that same field data to financing and risk coverage.

Calculator: Estimate Your Farm’s Bushels-to-Dollars Exposure

Since Colorado’s corn yield runs well below the Corn Belt average because of water availability rather than management, the number that actually matters to a Colorado grower is how many bushels — and how many dollars — a given yield gap represents on their own acreage. Enter your acres, your expected yield, and a market price to see the swing.

Assumptions: this is a simple bushels × price calculation using whatever figures you enter — it does not account for input costs, crop insurance indemnities, basis, or contracted prices, and it does not model irrigation cost. Default values reflect Colorado's 2023 state-average corn yield (122.0 bu/acre) against the 2024 national average (179.3 bu/acre) per USDA NASS; replace them with your own field data and current local cash price for a figure specific to your operation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Colorado's agricultural output is real and trackable, but it is a wheat-and-corn plains economy shaped by water scarcity, not a Corn Belt-scale producer — 123.83 million bushels of corn and 74.62 million bushels of wheat in 2023, against a national corn crop of 14.9 billion bushels and an Iowa corn crop alone of 2.63 billion bushels in 2024. The durable takeaway is not any single number here, since USDA reissues every one of them on its own annual schedule: it's knowing exactly which USDA NASS report to open for the current figure, whether that's Colorado's own statistics page, the national Crop Production summary, or Quick Stats for farm counts and acreage.

To track your own fields against these statewide numbers in-season, explore Farmonaut's platform via web, Android, or iOS.