The Impact of Weather on Agricultural Labor Supply

Recent work shows that the weather affects U.S. labor productivity and supply (e.g., Deryugina and Hsiang, 2016). Agricultural economists have been looking at the factors affecting farmers’ allocation of labor between on- and off- farm work. We estimate the impact of temperature and precipitation on individual on-farm labor supply using 10 years of the Agricultural Resource Management Survey data. We find that temperature and farm operator labor supply have a parabolic relationship with a minimum at 61oF. We compute that one 1oF increase in annual temperature translates into 8.5 million hours of reduced country-wide farm operator labor valued at about $188 million. Precipitation has a significant but negligible marginal impact on the operator labor supply, consistent with the existing literature