Rapid assessment of flood-induced agricultural losses to support infrastructure and policy decisions

This study develops an integrated, stochastic modeling framework to quantify three distinct agricultural flood-damage aspects—prevented planting, unharvested acreage, and yield loss—in Chariton County, Missouri, a flood-prone row-crop region along the Missouri, Grand, and Chariton Rivers. Flooding imposes persistent and economically significant damage on agricultural production, yet existing damage assessment frameworks inadequately characterize the full spectrum of crop production impacts. Empirical crop-response models are estimated using long-term hydrologic and production records, then embedded within a 50-year probabilistic baseline calibrated to US Army Corps of Engineers Annual Exceedance Probabilities via Log-Pearson Type III simulation with Cholesky-decomposed precipitation–flow correlations.

Three structural flood-mitigation scenarios (20-, 25-, and 50-year protection levels) are evaluated against this baseline. Results indicate that the 50-year baseline generates approximately USD 189.7 million in net agricultural losses within the project area. Mitigation to 20-, 25-, and 50-year protection levels avoids approximately USD 80.1, 86.4, and 90.5 million over 50 years, respectively, with diminishing marginal returns at higher protection levels. Reductions in prevented planting acreage also imply meaningful decreases in federal crop insurance indemnity expenditures. The framework is transferable to other flood prone agricultural regions and advances methodological capacity for benefit–cost evaluation of flood mitigation investments.