Agricultural adaptation to climate change is indispensable. Unfortunately, most climate response modeling methods accounting for adaptation are based on economic modelling that assumes simple farm profit-maximization and autonomous farm adaptation. This makes adaptation look like something unconditional , explaining why agricultural policy down-sized the attention for adaptation. This is incorrect as adaptation is facing numerous barriers such as low levels of adaptive capacity. This paper therefore captures and quantifies the impact of adaptive capacity explicitly in economic cross-sectional models, showing that those methods can be more policy-oriented. It shows that higher levels of adaptive capacity lead to more positive climate responses. Acknowledgement : This paper was supported by the Horizon 2020 project SUFISA (Grant Agreement No. 635577).