Senators introduce cover crop legislation

Apr 30, 2021

Sens. Stabenow and Thune introduced the Cover Crop Flexibility Act of 2021

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

U.S. Senators from both sides of the aisle have introduced a bill designed to encourage farmers to plant cover crops.

Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and John Thune (R-S.D.) tabled the Cover Crop Flexibility Act of 2021.

Generally, farmers who plant cover crops on prevent plant acres cannot hay or graze that cover crop before Nov. 1. Doing so could affect prevent plant insurance payments.

If passed, the bipartisan legislation would lift the Nov. 1 date.

In addition, it would allow the United States Department of Agriculture to include cover crop seed costs when it calculates prevent plant insurance and direct the ag department to examine the extent that cover crops reduce risks of prevent planting and other crop insurance losses.

These changes would help more farmers plant cover crops without worrying about penalties, Stabenow said.

“Planting cover crops is an important way farmers can improve their land and address the climate crisis, she said in a statement. “When extreme weather causes farmers to miss a planting season, farmers aren’t able to grow beneficial cover crops without facing a crop insurance penalty. This commonsense change permanently fixes that problem and is a win for the environment and for farmers.”

Multiple industry organizations support the bill.

This legislation provides producers with the flexibility they need in the event of severe weather, said Randy Poll, president of the Michigan Corn Growers Association.

“This legislation will give farmers some much-needed flexibility in managing their land to deal with unforeseen weather impacts like what we experienced in 2019,” he said in a press release. “It also allows us to better protect Michigan’s land by strategically using cover crops to improve soil health and fertility, suppress weeds, and reduce soil erosion.

In total nearly 40 groups are in favor of these proposed changes.

They include the National Corn Growers Association, American Soybean Association, National Association of Wheat Growers, U.S. Cattlemen’s Association and the American Seed Trade Association.

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids