Nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to U.S. crop yields under climate change

The United States produces 41% of the world's corn and 38% of the world's soybeans. These crops comprise two of the four largest sources of caloric energy produced and are thus critical for world food supply. We pair a panel of county-level yields for these two crops, plus cotton (a warmer-weather crop), with a new fine-scale weather dataset that incorporates the whole distribution of temperatures within each day and across all days in the growing season. We find that yields increase with temperature up to 29 degrees C for corn, 30 degrees C for soybeans, and 32 degrees C for cotton but that temperatures above these thresholds are very harmful. The slope of the decline above the optimum is significantly…

• HU
  Harvard University
• AS
  Arizona State University
• NC
  North Carolina State University
• UO
  University of Wyoming
• DC
  Dartmouth College
• GS
  Georgia State University
• UO
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign