Rural Electric Cooperatives and Agricultural Persistence: Evidence from a 122-Year County Panel

Between 1930 and 2022, the United States lost nearly three-quarters of its farms. We examine whether electric cooperatives created under the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 slowed this decline. Using a 122-year county panel and variation in cooperative service territories, we estimate the long-run effects of cooperative-led electrification on rural economic outcomes. Our augmented event-study design, which includes state-by-year fixed effects and baseline controls interacted with year, shows that cooperative counties retained about 15% more farms by 2022. The effect is negligible through midcentury but grows steadily after 1950. It is absent in raw cross-county comparisons and appears only when conditioning on within-state variation and pre-treatment differences, reflecting where cooperatives initially formed rather than federal targeting. We find no detectable effects on population, manufacturing, or retail, suggesting an agricultural stabilization channel: electrification helped sustain farms that might otherwise have exited. This contrasts with broad growth effects documented in developing-country electrification studies.