Large Farms Adopt Cover Cropping

I just came across this article in USA Today about cover cropping. Specifically, how a number of large farms are turning to it to for its many benefits.

From the article:

“My biggest driver is trying to save money,” he said. “I’ve cut our fertilizer use by 20%, we’re skipping a herbicide application and my fields hold more water.”  

There are some big changes being made:

Ten years ago only about 10 million acres in the US were planted with cover crops. Today that’s up to about 22 million acres and it’s increasing by about 8% annually, said Rob Myers, director of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture at the University of Missouri.

A study last month by researchers at the University of Illinois found in the Midwest cover cropped acreage increased four times from 2011 to 2021.

This heralds the return of very old agricultural practice, said Myers. “George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would write letters to each other about what cover crops they were planting.”  

Good to hear!  I was talking with a rowcrop farmer this autumn who'd implemented cover cropping the past decade or more- it's been a long-term investment for him, his neighbors all thought he was crazy...but it was paying off this season, with the drought that torched many other fields.

He said the biggest hurdle was working with crop insurance- there's institutional inertia towards doing things the way they always have.   Hopefully as more outfits demonstrate it's a safe bet, there won't be so many obstacles.  

Cover cropping used to be subsidized back in the 1980,s then was nixed

A few years ago the USDA was smart enough to implement it again. Around me everyone cover crops with winter rye but then again if the government is paying you too, why not? I think it is only on HEL highly erodible land, which does make sense.

The real question is; when they stop paying how many farms will stop the practice?

Cover crops work,  many have been using them for hundreds of years.        I guess they are not used more because the chemical industry owns our school systems that teach farming, thus they are taught that way to get yields is to use chemical fertilizers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Rotation

"The Old Rotation is a soil fertility experiment on the Auburn University campus in Auburn, Alabama. The Old Rotation experiment, which started in 1896, is the third-oldest ongoing field crop experiment in the United States and the oldest continuous cotton experiment in the world. It was the first experiment to show that a cotton/legume crop rotation would allow soil to support a cotton crop indefinitely. The Old Rotation is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.|

This is really cool.  I hope more and more large (And small) farms adopt cover cropping. Helen Atthowe talks a lot about cover crops and building habitat in her course.   You can see her talk about 6 farms that did cover cropping to do just this in this excerpt from The Garden Master Course