Cover crop usage continues to grow across the country. Earlier this week, the Conservation Technology Information Center announced the findings of its eighth national cover crop survey. Rob Myers of Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, or SARE, was one of the presenters and noted that familiarity with cover crops breeds appreciation.
“Those that actually have experience working with cover crops have become very convinced of the benefits, and that’s something we hear from farmers widely, that once they’ve had a few years of experience with cover crops, they really tend to stick with them. They have become a believer in the benefits for soil health and other aspects of their farming and ultimately in their economic bottom line.”
Benefits include erosion protection and increased soil health. Myers noted some barriers to adoption of cover cropping.
“Economic return. There’s a question from those who have not yet used them, is this really going to pay off for me? Understandably, any farmer making a decision on spending money on inputs, whether it’s cover crop, seed, new equipment, a fungicide, they’ve got to evaluate the economics. So there’s a perception among those that haven’t yet used them, that there might not be that economic return, especially in the first year, we could look at our past cover crop surveys of farmers to see quite a bit of economic data that actually does show that cover crops pay off, especially after the first two to three years.”
In addition to the agricultural advantages, Myers said many have taken advantage of the incentives programs, particularly from NRCS.
“NRCS is the number one source, indeed, the largest amount of dollars flowing to cover crop incentive payments are coming not only from the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, but the Conservation Stewardship Program are the two big ones within RCS. We’ve seen other special projects that have been funded by NRCS through competitive grants that have also provided support for cover crops.”