By John Lovett
Using satellite imagery and government data, researchers measured a 5 percent increase in voluntary, or non-subsidized, cover crop adoption by Arkansas farmers.
The finding came out of research seeking to pinpoint how farmers were using cover crops and where, to help policymakers develop more targeted incentives for using cover crops.
Planted over the winter months between cash crops, cover crops such as clover, oats and rye can mitigate soil erosion, improve soil health, water and nutrient retention, and provide weed and pest management options, according to research done by the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.
Using data from 2013-2019, agricultural economists with the experiment station showed that cover crop adoption in Arkansas had the greatest association with a soybean-to-soybean cash crop rotation. This is no small thing: Soybeans are economically significant in Arkansas, accounting for $2.3 billion in cash farm receipts in 2023, according to the Arkansas Agriculture Profile.
Identifying the trends in what cash crops are grown with cover crops was “the real novelty of this study,” said Lanier Nalley, corresponding author and head of the department of agricultural economics and agribusiness for the Division of Agriculture and the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences.
“With GPS coordinates from National Resource Conservation Service, we knew where cover crops were being grown for government payments, but the literature is very sparse, specifically in the South, about what crops are being rotated with cover crops,” Nalley added.
The period of 2013 to 2019 was the latest available data at the time of the study covering the entirety or parts of 27 Arkansas counties in the Arkansas Delta.
Merely estimating cover crop acreage would have been insufficient, Nalley explained, because it would give no insight into how cover crops fit into cropping rotations, or their effectiveness.
Published in the Public Library of Science journal PLOS One under the title “Satellite Remote Sensing Reveals Voluntary Cover-Crop Adoption and Crop-Rotation Hotspots in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain,” Nalley and his co-authors report that government support and voluntary planting tended to rise together, showing a positive relationship between the two.
The increase in voluntary cover crop adoption can be attributed to one of two things, Nalley said. It could be due to farmers who previously received government payments who decided to continue growing cover crops while avoiding the cumbersome record-keeping and application requirements for the government subsidies. Or it could be a “spillover effect,” when farmers adopt the practice after seeing a neighboring farmer’s benefits of planting cover crops.
“An interesting thing for me was seeing how many people are just doing this because they realize the economic and environmental benefits and don't even need government payments,” Nalley said. “They are doing this for either profit maximization or land stewardship maximization.”
Source : uada.edu