Quantifying the Impacts of Excess Water on Agricultural Losses and the Role of Adaptive Infrastructure

Abstract

Excess water during the planting season is a growing source of production and income risk for agriculture. Yet its impacts remain poorly quantified. Existing studies typically rely on precipitation‐based indicators and therefore miss how soil saturation, runoff dynamics, and adaptive infrastructure shape crop failure. This paper fills that gap by integrating high‐resolution hydrologic model outputs with county‐level reports of failed and prevented planting across the U.S. Midwest from 2009 to 2020. We construct process‐based measures of runoff and soil moisture and evaluate their ability to explain losses while explicitly accounting for the presence of subsurface drainage systems. Hydrologic indicators strongly predict planting‐season losses: one additional day above the 95th‐percentile runoff threshold was associated with increase in failed or prevented acres by 0.37–0.42 percent. Counties with extensive artificial drainage see up to a 4.38 percent reduction in failed acres (up to 87% reduction in planting risk). Aggregated across the region, subsurface drainage preserved an estimated $13.53 billion in avoided agricultural losses over the study period. The results demonstrate that model‐derived excess‐water metrics outperform precipitation in most model setups. In particular, runoff‐based measures become especially informative when accounting for interactions with subsurface drainage infrastructure, highlighting how hydrologic context shapes crop susceptibility to excess water. The findings show the value of integrating hydrologic processes and adaptive infrastructure into agricultural risk assessment within coupled human–environment systems. Despite the value of drainage demonstrated here, future integrative work must consider potential tradeoffs imposed by nitrate concentrations and export.