German Society of Agronomy

After wheat and barley, rye is the third most commonly grown cereal in Germany, covering an area of 588,000 hectares or 5% of arable land. While rye, wheat, and barley each accounted for approximately 30% of the grain area in the 1950s, the area cultivated with wheat was almost five times larger than that cultivated with rye in 2022. One reason for this is changing dietary habits, with higher demand for white flour products. Per capita consumption of rye meal and flour in Germany was still 35 kg per capita in the early 1950s and has since fallen to just 6.8 kg. Nevertheless, Germany is the largest rye producer in the EU with a harvest of 3.1 million tons, and an additional 0.4 million tons are imported on a net basis. However, only about 25% of rye grown in Germany today is used for the production of baked goods. The vast majority, about 55%, is used as animal feed. The remaining 20% is used for bioenergy production and other industrial purposes.

Rye is cultivated almost exclusively as a winter cereal and is particularly widespread in northern and eastern Germany, with a focus on the federal states of Brandenburg and Lower Saxony. This is due to rye's undemanding nature in terms of location and climatic conditions. Compared to other cereals, it has the lowest water requirements during the main growth phase, making it ideal for the low-precipitation sandy soils of Brandenburg, for example. Rye germinates even at low temperatures and is also the most winter-hardy cereal, which is why Poland and Eastern European countries with a continental climate and typically harsh winters are among the most important producing countries.

Rye has a comparatively lush and deep root system, which allows it to absorb and utilize not only water but also nutrients from the soil. In addition, it is more tolerant of soil-borne crop rotation diseases than wheat. All in all, rye is a crop that can be produced with low risk and stable yields with comparatively low inputs. These characteristics made rye the most important bread grain in poorer and drier locations for many centuries. There, it was often grown in monoculture or single-field farming, which is still practiced today in some cases due to a lack of economic alternatives. On an experimental site at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, there is a plot that has been continuously cultivated with rye since 1878. The "Eternal rye", as Germany's oldest long-term field trial, has the status of a cultural monument. The Groß-Enzersdorf experimental farm of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, has also had such an “eternal rye” plot since 1906. In better locations, rye is often grown after wheat, which means that its yield potential cannot be fully exploited. However, rye could regain importance in the future, particularly in view of the increasing cultivation risks posed by climate change and the increased restrictions in the area of chemical plant protection.