Impact of Extreme Heat on Corn and Soybean Yields: Implications for Food Prices

The United States produces roughly 40 percent of the world's corn and soybeans, two of the major staples that are critical for world food supply. We link yields in more than 2,000 US counties in 56 years to fine-scaled weather data and find a highly nonlinear relationship: yields increase with temperature until a threshold when further temperature increases are very harmful. Extremely warm temperatures are predicted to increase significantly under climate change with large implications for food prices.