date:May 21, 2013
limbed 21 percent since the 1980s, to 92.4 million acres (37.4 million hectares).
The consolidation of farming is a key reason farmers - no matter how hard they work during improving weather - will struggle to eclipse a record that has stood for nearly two decades. The fastest stretch of planting occurred in a single week of May in 1992, when farmers rolled through 34,103,730 acres, or roughly 43 percent of that year's planting. That bested the prior record, set in 1984, by more than 5 million