Drought-tolerant crops as a drought adaptation tool: productivity, input complementarity, and risk effects

Jonathan McFadden, Samuel Bailey, Daniel Bonin, Laura Paul and Jonathan Malacarne

Chapter 10 in Handbook on Climate Change Impacts, Mitigation, and Adaptation in Agriculture, 2026, pp 200-230 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Increasing climate variability is heightening drought risk in agriculture, spurring interest in drought-tolerant (DT) crops. This chapter evaluates the effectiveness of DT corn as a drought adaptation tool in US agriculture, using microdata from the USDA's Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS). We estimate production functions with heteroskedastic specifications to quantify the DT trait's effects on mean yields and yield variance. We also derive elasticities of substitution and employ quantile regressions to evaluate broader distributional impacts. Our results indicate that DT corn increases average yields by approximately 4–9%, and significantly reduces cross-sectional variance by 20–27%, particularly under moderate droughts. Elasticity estimates suggest DT use is complementary with irrigation and labor, but weakly substitutable with conservation tillage. The quantile regressions further reveal that DT adoption improves outcomes at the lower tail of yield and profit distributions. Our findings imply that DT corn can function as a shallow-loss insurance mechanism.

Keywords: Drought Tolerance; Productivity; Corn; Adaptation; Input Substitutability; Risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035344963
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