By Kade Grafel, Research Analyst, Decision Innovation Solutions
While not as widely grown as corn, soybeans, or wheat, dry beans (such as kidney, navy, pinto, and black beans) are an essential crop grown throughout the United States. Twenty-six states reported some level of dry bean production in the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture, with six more states having production of an undisclosed amount.
Dry bean production is heavily concentrated in just a few states. Only North Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, and Nebraska have an annual production greater than 1 million hundredweight (cwt). These four states produced around 87% of all dry beans grown in 2022.
The map below shows the estimated dry bean acreage in each county according to the 2023 Cropland Data Layer (CDL). The CDL is a service provided by the USDA that estimates land use through satellite imagery. Because of its different methodology, crop totals in the CDL data may not exactly match what is reported in USDA census and survey data.
County data from the CDL shows that dry bean production is heavily concentrated in a few regions—some of the most prominent are along the North Dakota-Minnesota border, the “thumb” of Michigan, far western Nebraska, southern Idaho, and central Washington. Often, dry bean production is concentrated in just a few counties within a state, with the remaining counties having fewer than 500 acres of beans.
Of the 15 counties with the most acres of dry beans according to the 2023 CDL, eight are in North Dakota, four are in Michigan, and there is one county each from Minnesota, Washington, and Nebraska. Huron County, Michigan, has the greatest area of dry beans planted with nearly 84,000 acres, followed by Walsh and Grand Forks counties in North Dakota with 71,736 and 60,760 acres, respectively.
Even among high-production counties, dry beans typically do not take up a substantial portion of a county’s total area. Huron County in Michigan is an outlier, with 15.7% of the county’s total area being dry beans. Dry beans in every other county in the U.S. make up less than 9% of that county’s area. Even among counties with high bean production, dry beans are typically 5% or less of the county’s total land area.