More than 650 farm advisors from across the U.S. participated in a survey on cover crops, shining light on how they advise growers on cover crops. A report on the survey was released this week by the Conservation Technology Information Center (CTIC), USDA SARE Program, and the American Seed Trade Association. This is the eighth national cover crop survey conducted by those groups since 2012 and the first to focus on advisors. Here’s a short clip shedding light on some of the results.
“Those that actually have experience working with cover crops have become very convinced of the benefits and that’s something we hear from farmers widely, that once they’ve had a few years of experience with cover crops, they really tend to stick with them. They have become a believer in the benefits for soil health and other aspects of their farming and ultimately in their economic bottom line. So one of the questions was what percentage of your farmer clients use cover crops — of course this varied from advisor to advisor but overall 54% of those have said that it was a quarter or less of their farmers and this isn't surprising. Keep in mind a lot of these farm advisors are advising dozens of clients that have a variety of farming approaches.”
“The barriers that you hear about from farmers not adopting cover crops — keep in mind that these are perceptions that are from farmers who haven’t gotten into cover cropping but it’s important to acknowledge that these perceptions are driving farmers’ decision making. So the two big ones there are the economic return, there’s a question from those who have not yet used them — is this really going to pay off for me? Understandably any farmer making a decision on spending money on inputs, whether its cover crop seed, new equipment, fungicide, they have to evaluate the economics. So there’s a perception among those who haven’t used them that there might not be that economic return especially in the first year. We could look at our past cover crop surveys of farmers to see quite a bit of economic data that actually does show that cover crops pay off — especially after the first 2-3 years. But again, this is a perception that holds some farmers back.”
Some really interesting figures and notes from that data, and we will have plenty more coverage to follow that will dive even deeper into those results so be sure to stay tuned for more content coming soon on Cover Crop Strategies.
