Using cover crops for conservation and insurance cost reduction
Bringing cover crops into a production system is just one of many potential conservation practices that farmers can invest in to move toward greater long-term resilience and sustainability. Over the last two decades, regenerative organic farmers, who cannot use synthetics, have demonstrated that legume cover crops act as a natural fertilizer. About 90 percent of organic farmers have incorporated cover crops into their productions systems, while only about 10 percent of non-organic farmers have done so, as reported by the Organic Research Foundation. Cover cropping can be accomplished.
However, though doable, cover cropping is not easy in all agro-ecologies. As can be seen in the figure, cover cropping is not practiced everywhere. For instance, we at NCAT have shown in many ATTRA Sustainable Agriculture publications that cover cropping can be tricky in hot, humid areas and semi-arid environments. In my own 25 years of work with grain farmers in the semi-arid northern Great Plains, I have observed that adoption of cover cropping is very difficult. It takes several years to adopt and requires a keen ability to adapt quickly to seasonal weather changes in this vast region of low precipitation.
Public Incentives Are Available
The USDA has made available significant public dollars to provide farmers incentives to adopt cover cropping. The principal USDA agency that provides support for the adoption of cover crops is the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Two working lands programs — the Environment Quality Incentive Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) — are the major sources of incentive dollars for cover cropping.
Each program, however, has more applicants asking for these resources than are available. Also, access to this public resource varies depending on which state you are in and how the local NRCS team prioritizes the adoption of cover crops in their state. Many hundreds of millions of public dollars have been spent over the last 18 years through the EQIP program alone.
The level of support to adopt this practice varies significantly across the United States. For example, the NRCS in Maryland provides about hundred dollars per acre for adoption while other states like Montana are more in the $50/acre range. Also, some state governments provide additional resources for cover cropping.
CSP, on the other hand, is a comprehensive whole-farm approach to improving conservation on the farm and ranch; cover cropping is generally only one of many conservation practices supported by the program.
On NCAT’S ATTRA website (attra.ncat.org) there are many practical publications, blogs and podcasts about cover cropping, including a publication called, “Federal Working Lands Conservation Resources for Sustainable Farming and Ranching,” which details how to access NRCS resources for cover cropping and other conservation practices.
Crop Insurance and Cover Cropping
Federally subsidized crop insurance is a joint effort of 13 private companies (known as Approved Insurance Providers, or AIPs) and the federal government. The Risk Management Agency (RMA) is the USDA agency that sets the rules for the many types of policies offered to farmers and ranchers. In turn, the RMA is ultimately governed by the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC). Also, many independent crop insurance agents directly service farmers and ranchers with their insurance needs.
Historically, the FCIC and RMA did not provide any financial support for the adoption of cover cropping, even though such adoption could potentially reduce the risk of crop failures in the medium- to long-term. For many years, RMA negatively impacted the adoption of cover cropping and other conservation practices by farmers because of its Good Farming Practices (GFP), which state that any innovative cropping practice cannot be used if it will not allow the insured crop “to make normal progress toward maturity and produce at least the yield used to determine the production guarantee or amount of insurance.” It is likely that when adopting any new practice, yields will be lower until the practice can be fully learned.
This crop insurance fine print has taken years to resolve for cover cropping and included a long dialog with NRCS to create a guidance document that still insists, for instance, that in the semi-arid dryland farming regions of the intermountain West, cover crops must be terminated by a certain date, and that if not, coverage could be lost. Practices like interseeding are simply forbidden as not GFP. This has caused some regenerative organic farmers to not use crop insurance.
In the last few years, however, in part because of the COVID pandemic, it does seem that RMA is gaining support for cover cropping. In response to perceived hardships to cover cropping, it has offered a reduction in crop insurance of $5 per cover-cropped acre. Started in 2021, this program was extended for 2022. Whether this benefit will continue is not yet known.
Jeff Schahczenski is an Agriculture and Natural Resource Economist at the National Center for Appropriate Technology.
