Correction to: Nature Sustainability https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00699-2, published online 25 March 2021.

A few issues regarding the original published version of this article were brought to our attention. In an effort to reproduce the work, we found the need to provide some corrections to the original paper. Here we report a full re-extraction of the values from the primary literature, re-coding of the formulae used for standardization, and re-analysis. We note that after this effort, the main conclusions of the original paper are not substantially affected. The one notable change is that we no longer find evidence for labour being a significant explanatory cause of the inverse size–yield relationship. We thank Hugo Storm, Dario Schulz and Thomas Heckelei for bringing some of these issues to our attention, which led us to undertake this re-analysis. Figs. 2–5 from the main text and the Supplementary Information (including Supplementary Methods, figures, tables, as well as code and data) have been updated in the HTML and PDF versions of the article. An explanation of the reanalysis and changes made can be found in the Supplementary Information accompanying this amendment.