Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Identifying Past Crop Switching In The Contiguous United States: Where Farmers Are Adapting To Changing Conditions, Christopher Brittain

Food Systems Master's Project Reports

Crop switching, which occurs when a novel crop type is introduced to an agricultural plot, is an adaptation strategy that is used in response to a variety of social, economic, and environmental factors. While past studies have investigated the motivations behind crop switching and examined its role in mitigating future agricultural losses due to climate change, understanding of where crop switching has occurred in the United States is more limited. In this paper, I develop a method of identifying the individual plots on which crop switching occurred in the contiguous United States. This method uses the Cropland Data Layer from …