Capturing Crop Resilience to Extreme Weather Under Conservation Practices: Evidence From Crop Insurance Indemnities

38 pagesIn the face of climate change and more frequent extreme weather, increasing crop resilience to weather anomaly has become a critical issue. This study explores the relationship between conservation practices (cover crop, no-tillage) and the resilience of corn and soybean to extreme precipitation, based on county-level data from the U.S. Corn Belt from 2005 to 2018. Crop insurance indemnities reflect crop losses and therefore reflect crop resilience. The research constructs three county- and year-fixed-effect regression models. Regression results show that as the degrees of weather extremes increases, the crop indemnities increase in general. When the interaction of extreme weather and conservation practices is taken into consideration, the relationships between conservation practices and indemnity level are not consistent, and they are based on the degree of weather anomaly. Corn cover crop acres are negatively correlated with the corn indemnity regardless of the precipitation level, and the soybean no-tillage acres are positively correlated with the soybean indemnity regardless of the precipitation level. However, for the corn no-tillage practices and the soybean cover crop practices, only when the precipitation is close to an average level do they negatively correlate with their corresponding crop indemnity levels. The capacity and resilience cultivation effect of conservation practices may vary across different crops and practices