Cover crops are a well-known way to reduce nutrient runoff and soil erosion when farmland is idle outside of the growing season but few corn and soybean farmers plant them, says the Environmental Working Group. In a report, EWG suggested “shifting a small allocation” of money from crop subsidies and crop insurance to pay for a dramatic boost in the cost-share funds that help farmers get started with the practice.
“At current rates of progress, it will take decades to get use of cover crops at the scale needed to make a real difference,” said the report. “That’s too long to wait.” Corn and soybean fields in the Upper Mississippi basin are blamed for 39 percent of nitrogen and 26 percent of phosphorus runoff into the Gulf of Mexico, where a “dead zone” appears each year.
Based on satellite imagery, the EWG estimated cover crops were sown on 2.6 percent of corn and soybean land in Iowa, 2.3 percent in Illinois and 7.1 percent in Indiana in 2015. Iowa and Illinois are the two top states for corn and soybean production.
“Adoption is scanty for a few reasons, I guess,” said EWG senior vice president Craig Cox. There is no regulatory push for cover crops and they add additional land management steps to an operation. The crops improve soil health yet it “takes a while to see benefits to the bottom line,” said Cox. “As with all conservation practices these days, land tenure – rented vs. owned land – makes a big difference.” That’s because a renter may not be as motivated as the landowner in bearing the cost of a new practice that does not have an immediate payback.
“One of the biggest challenges of cover cropping is to fit cover crops into your current rotations or to develop new rotations that take full advantage of their benefits,” says the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Extension, a USDA-funded program. SARE says cover crops improve soil health but the financial impact is difficult to quantify. Cover crops require as much attention as cash crops, says SARE. “Failure to do so can lead to failure of the cover crop and cause problems in other parts of your system.”
Some growers say the federally subsidized crop insurance program is an obstacle too with complex rules over what constitutes good farming practice and does not interfere with the requirements for coverage of a cash crop. (FERN explored this issue in a story with Ensia.)
Cover crops are one of the most effective in-field practices for reducing nutrient runoff from land in a corn and soybean rotation, commonly used in the Midwest. The USDA is devoting a larger portion of its cost-sharing Environmental Quality Incentive Program funds to cover crops in Illinois, Indiana and Iowa, said EWG. But the funding is comparatively small, so adoption grows slowly. At current funding, it would take 40 years for Iowa to reach its goal of cover crops on 12.6 million acres, it calculated.
“EWG believes that shifting a small allocation” of crop subsidies and subsidies on crop insurance premiums “to water quality would provide enough stimulus to seriously jumpstart progress to tackling water quality issues,” said the report. “Farmers are ready to be rewarded for providing this public benefit and allocating funds for the current USDA subsidy programs to farmers who use cove crops could spur real change.”
There was no immediate word of congressional proponents for such a shift.