The financial and risk-reducing benefits of conservation practices such as cover crops and conservation tillage are increasingly evident, said the AGree Initiative on farm policy in a report on Tuesday. “Further, ecosystem services markets may provide farmers with new economic opportunities to diversify their income,” said the report, aimed in part at farm lenders.
Conservation tillage has become increasingly common among farmers although not universally adopted. Cover crops have receive attention as a potential way to earn money from a carbon contract while mitigating climate change on the farm. However, there can be increased costs and new practices may require new management skills.
“Benefits are clear in terms of reduced erosion, better soil resiliency and improved soil organic matter over time,” said the report, written by Rob Myers, director of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture at the University of Missouri.
“Do these improved soil traits lead to better rental values or sale value for farm land? More trendline data is needed but there is an expectation that the marketplace will over time take into account better soil health in valuing cropland rental rates and sale values.”
Cover crops are planted on around 20 million acres of cropland and no-till farming is used on 100 million acres, said the report. The 2017 Census of Agriculture listed 396 million acres of cropland in the country.
“Evidence shows that such practices increase profit while reducing risk,” said the report. It cited a 2019 study that showed it took around three years for cover crops to break even financially, considering the cost of seed. “However, yields gradually trended upwards with improving soil health following cover crops, with a resulting gradual decline in in costs for key inputs such as fertilizers and herbicides. Thus over time, cover crops proved to be a profitable practice.”
A recent analysis by the USDA, the University of Illinois and the nonprofit Meridian Institute, the parent of AGree, concluded that use of cover crops and no-till for even a single year reduced by one-quarter the chances that a farmer would be unable to plant a crop in a timely manner during a unusually wet spring. The project examined “prevent plant” crop insurance claims in 2019, a wet year.
For years, cover crops and reduced- or no-till practices were promoted as a way to increase organic matter in the soil, control weeds or improve yields, with some farmers reporting higher yields.
In a 2021 Purdue survey of large-scale farmers, four out of five growers with cover crops said they improve soil health and crop yields. But there was a huge turnover — half of the farmers in the survey said they abandoned cover crops in the past or never tried them for reasons that included “not profitable,” “hurt yields,” “lack of resources” and “insufficient soil benefits.” Half of growers in the survey told Purdue they planted cover crops in 2021 but many were relative newcomers with a limited amount of land in cover crops.
Source: agriculture.com
Categories: Missouri, Crops