Creating American Farmland: Governance Institutions and Investment in Agricultural Drainage

Eric Edwards and Walter N. Thurman

No 30081, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The U.S. Corn Belt, relatively flat and covered with thick glacial soils, is famously responsible for the bulk of U.S. corn production. Development of this central part of the continent came with remarkable technical progress—in seed varieties, mechanization, fertilization, and pest control. Little of this development could have occurred without decades of investment in farmland itself, through the methodical application of drainage. We trace the economic forces that drove wide-scale drainage in the eastern United States and present empirical evidence that a key institutional innovation, the drainage management district, facilitated investment. Today, over 50% of corn produced in the Corn Belt comes from counties with high natural soil wetness requiring artificial drainage. States in our sample adopted drainage district laws between 1857 and 1912, and we estimate artificial drainage facilitated by management districts across all eastern states increased the value of agricultural land in counties with high natural soil wetness by 20-37% ($16.8-18.7 billion in 2020 dollars). Although the broader implications of drainage were largely unforeseen at the time, the conversion led to the loss of more than half of the 215 million acres of wetlands estimated to have existed in the contiguous United States at colonization.

JEL-codes: N51 N52 Q1 Q15 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env and nep-his
Note: DAE EEE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published as The Economics of Climatic Adaptation: Agricultural Drainage in the United States , Eric C. Edwards, Walter N. Thurman. in American Agriculture, Water Resources, and Climate Change , Libecap and Dinar. 2024

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30081.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:30081

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30081

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().