The Economic Cost of Agricultural Climate Migration in the United States

Crop production in the United States has migrated northward at approximately 15 miles per decade over the past seven decades, yet the economic consequences of this geographic reorganization remain unquantified. Here we estimate four interconnected costs of agricultural climate migration using county8 level panel data across 2,902 counties, a 10-GCM CMIP6 ensemble under SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0, and crop-switching classifiers validated against four historical transitions. Three independent valuation methods—hedonic regression (R2 = 0.73), discounted cash flow, and cap-rate analysis—converge on $56–168 billion in unpriced climate risk embedded in US farmland markets (2023 USD; 95% CI $52–69 billion for the conservative DCF estimate). An instrumental variables strategy (first-stage F = 1,184) links this asset exposure to observed community decline: 473 counties exhibit four or more simulta14 neous indicators of rural contraction in 2009–2023 data. Federal crop insurance misprices climate risk by $5.9 billion yr−1 (95% CI $5.4–6.4 billion), generating a $2.8 billion annual implicit transfer from climate-advantaged to climate-stressed counties. An additional 514 northern counties hold $51 billion yr−1 in agricultural opportunity that existing infrastructure cannot capture. These consequences are interconnected: the insurance transfer subsidizes continued investment where climate prospects are de19 teriorating while draining capital from regions gaining viability. Blending backward-looking premiums with forward-looking climate projections would correct the price signal without requiring new legisla21 tion, as existing authority under the Federal Crop Insurance Act permits modification of premium-setting methodology.