Here we present a data set of crop performance in France, one of Europe’s major crop producers. The data set comprises ten crops (barley, maize, oats, potatoes, rapeseed, sugarbeet, sunflower, durum wheat, soft wheat and wine) and covers the years 1900 to 2018. It contains harvested area, production and yield data for all 96 French départements (i.e. counties or NUTS3 level) with a total number of 375,264 data points. Entries until 1988 have been digitized manually from statistical yearbooks.

Crop area (in hectare, ha, for sown areas) and production (in kg) statistics on departmental level from 1900 until 1988 were collected from books of national agricultural statistics (‘Statistique agricole annuelle’ or ‘Annuaire de statistique agricole’) compiled by the French Ministry of Agriculture; detailed references are provided in the supplementary information. Numbers were manually digitized from photocopied versions of the original paper documents. Data from 1989 to 2018 were derived from digital statistics from the Agreste database (‘Statistique agricole annuelle’ compiled by the Service de la Statistique et de la Prospective (SSP), Secrétariat Général du Ministère de l’Agriculture, de l’Agroalimentaire et de la Forêt (MAAF), France); details are provided in the supplementary information. Yields were calculated from total production and sown area for each department to avoid apparently often incorrect yield values printed in the old statistics books. Yields are given in kilogram per hectare (kg/ha, for sown area) for dry mass with 10-16% moisture content, depending on the crop.