Adaptation to climate change: changes in farmland use and stocking rate in the U.S

Jianhong Mu (), Bruce McCarl and Anne Wein

Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 2013, vol. 18, issue 6, 713-730

Abstract: This paper examines possible adaptations to climate change in terms of pasture and crop land use and stocking rate in the United States (U.S.). Using Agricultural Census and climate data in a statistical model, we find that as temperature and precipitation increases agricultural commodity producers respond by reducing crop land and increasing pasture land. In addition, cattle stocking rate decreases as the summer Temperature-humidity Index (THI) increases and summer precipitation decreases. Using the statistical model with climate data from four General Circulation Models (GCMs), we project that land use shifts from cropping to grazing and the stocking rate declines, and these adaptations are more pronounced in the central and the southeast regions of the U.S. Controlling for other farm production variables, crop land decreases by 6 % and pasture land increases by 33 % from the baseline. Correspondingly, the associated economic impact due to adaptation is around −14 and 29 million dollars to crop producers and pasture producers by the end of this century, respectively. The national and regional results have implications for farm programs and subsidy policies. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013

Keywords: Adaptation; Climate change; Land use; Stocking rate; Fractional multinomial logit model; Climate projection; Economic impacts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11027-012-9384-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:masfgc:v:18:y:2013:i:6:p:713-730

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11027

DOI: 10.1007/s11027-012-9384-4

Access Statistics for this article

Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change is currently edited by Robert Dixon

More articles in Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().