The 2024/25 growing season confirmed that Argentine agriculture has completed its recovery from the catastrophic drought of 2022/23, which reduced total grain output by roughly 40 million tonnes and cost the country an estimated USD 20 billion in lost export revenue. Two consecutive seasons of normal to favorable rainfall across the Pampas and adjacent productive regions have allowed producers to rebuild inventories, rehabilitate marginal fields, and return planted areas to historical norms. The 2024/25 campaign stands out not merely as a recovery year but as an outright record season for several of the country's principal crops, with total grain and oilseed output estimated at volumes that place Argentina firmly among the world's top agricultural exporters. Our dashboard on the agricultural sector tracks production, area, and yield data across all major crops.
Soy and corn: both crops set new records
Soybean production for the 2024/25 season is estimated at 52 million tonnes, surpassing the previous historical record set in the 2021/22 campaign and marking a dramatic rebound from the 25 million tonnes harvested during the drought year of 2022/23. The recovery was driven by a combination of factors: expanded planted area, favorable precipitation timing during critical pollination windows, and the application of improved genetic material. Corn production also reached a record 57 million tonnes, benefiting from similarly favorable weather and from a structural shift by producers toward corn in rotation systems that has been building over the past decade. Together, these two crops alone account for the bulk of Argentina's agro-industrial export capacity, and their simultaneous record performance placed exceptional volumes into the export pipeline throughout 2025.
Wheat and the diversification of the export base
Wheat had an excellent campaign as well: the 2024/25 harvest yielded an estimated 21 million tonnes, approximately 40% above the prior year's output and one of the strongest wheat harvests in the country's history. This result was particularly significant given Argentina's role as a major wheat supplier to neighboring countries, including Brazil and several Southeast Asian destinations. Soybean complex exports — encompassing raw beans, soybean meal, and soybean oil — totaled USD 22.8 billion in 2025, an increase of 18% from 2024. The combination of record volumes and relatively stable international prices drove this result, which represented the single largest contribution to Argentina's merchandise export earnings. The full export figures are analyzed in our dashboard on foreign trade, which tracks both values and volumes by commodity category.
The macroeconomic role of the agro-industrial surplus
Argentina's agricultural sector plays a role in the macroeconomy that goes beyond its direct contribution to GDP. The agro-industrial trade surplus — the foreign exchange generated by exporting commodity products and their derivatives — is the primary source of the Central Bank's dollar inflows and a critical determinant of reserve levels. In 2025, the record harvest translated into sustained foreign exchange liquidation by producers and exporters throughout the year, contributing to the reserve accumulation that strengthened the government's monetary policy position. The soybean complex alone generated enough dollar inflows to cover more than three months of the country's total import bill, underscoring the sector's function as a structural pillar of external balance in a country that has historically struggled with recurring foreign exchange shortages.
Structural challenges: retentions, technology gaps, and climate risk
Despite the celebratory production figures, a clear-eyed assessment of Argentine agriculture must also acknowledge the medium-term challenges that constrain the sector's full potential. Export retentions — taxes on agricultural commodity exports — remain among the highest in the world for competing producers, with soybeans subject to a 33% export tax that reduces the net price received by domestic producers and creates persistent disincentives to expand output at the margin. While various reduction pathways have been discussed at the policy level, no structural reform of the retention system was completed during 2025. Additionally, a technological gap exists across less-developed productive provinces where irrigation infrastructure, logistics connectivity, and access to modern inputs lag behind the highly capitalized core Pampas region. Perhaps most fundamentally, three consecutive years of normal-to-good rainfall cannot be taken for granted: Argentina's agricultural geography is inherently vulnerable to the El Niño/La Niña cycle, and contingency planning for future drought scenarios remains an open challenge for both producers and policymakers.
