Climate variability and trends, cyclic climate and weather events and discontinuous extreme events influence agricultural production worldwide as well as technology and management trends. With climate change and an increasing frequency of extreme weather events this influence will remain strong. Droughts and heat waves in Australia, are among the Top 10 most important events since 1900 regarding the economic damage and people affected. Record‐breaking extreme events cause large economic losses, endanger local food security and affect millions of people. Previous studies found that changes in observed yield variability can be attributed to significant changes in climate variability but only for a few crop-country combinations. As it is difficult to draw a general conclusion from such mixed results for a range of crop-country combinations, more regionalized studies are needed for detecting trends in rainfall totals and extremes and identifying drivers of change. A case study for Australia will be presented here, with a focus on two research questions: (1) Have there been any significant changes in rainfall in important agricultural regions? (2) What were the main climatological causes of that change and can a human influence be detected, or be expected in the following decades? It is also necessary to quantify yield losses from historic extremes. Estimating the impact of extreme events on agricultural production requires separating climate effects from technology and management trends. We quantify how much of the changes in historic agricultural production from 1961 to 2010 can be attributed to climate variability and extreme weather events. While 10 out of 15 studied extreme indices are significantly correlated with wheat yields in Australia only few extreme indices correlate with maize, wheat and rice yields in two other case study countries, India and the United States. The largest yield reductions in Australia are statistically associated with droughts and heat waves.