Farm Manager Scott Latham describes some of the reasons he grows cover crops at Sauvie Island Organics, a 24-acre vegetable farm that serves the Portland, Ore., market. The farm's soils are sandy, so cover crops are used to maintain or improve soil organic matter amidst fairly intensive vegetable production.

No matter why you got into farming, profitability is still the end goal. Every farming practice undergone on your operation must be worth the return on investment. But what if we looked at cover crops in a different way — that covers themselves are the investment?

Strip tilling with cover crops is taking off in many regions of the U.S. and is relatively inexpensive. Seeding cover crops can occur during fall strip-tilling but comes with its own challenges in the spring. (Courtesy of Cover Crop Innovators)

An article from Bay Nature magazine takes readers inside a climate-controlled laboratory at the Duarte Nursery outside Modesto, where an experiment is taking place that could help determine what food we will eat for decades to come. Rows of steel racks contain numerous tiny almond, apple, walnut, pomegranate, pecan, avocado, fig, and pistachio trees in small translucent plastic cylinders. The saplings, planted in a high-nutrient agar mix that accelerates growth, are no more than two inches high and a few weeks old. Each is being subjected to versions of the stresses experienced just outside these walls in fields across the Central Valley: declining levels of water, escalating levels of salt. The big overarching, if unmentionable, force driving these experiments is climate change, which is beginning to roil the Central Valley.

This year traditional cover crop seed is hard to find. However, corn and soybeans can be considered a cover crop.

Growers who opt not to plant corn or soybeans this year because of consistently wet fields would be best off not leaving those fields bare, according to an expert at The Ohio State University.

The Stiefvaters use cover crops as additional feedstuffs for their 140-head cow-calf operation near Salem, SD.