Drivers of Cover Crop Adoption and Disadoption: The Role of Agricultural Policies, Climate, and Regional Dynamics

While existing research has examined a suite of factors affecting the adoption of cover crops in the United States, understanding the role of government programs and climate change has not been fully investigated over time, especially across a national sample. Furthermore, there is increasing attention on the potential disadoption of conservation practices including cover crops, and the drivers associated with cover crop disadoption is yet to be explored nationally. To fill these gaps in the literature, we combine multiple publicly available data sources to examine long-term county level cover crop adoption and disadoption over a recent decade in the United States. We estimate the association between government programs (i.e., conservation and non-conservation payments, state programs, crop insurance participation, and crop insurance premium subsidies) and climate conditions in counties’ cover crop adoption at both the national and regional levels. Additionally, we identify counties that decreased their cover crop adoption rate, that is, disadopted cover crops, and quantify the factors that correlate with the probability of disadoption. Increasing crop insurance participation within counties is associated with increasing cover crop adoption nationally and in the Southern Plains, Midwest, and Northeast; while increasing insurance premium subsidies are correlated with reduced cover crop adoption in the Midwest and Southeast but increased adoption in the Southern Plains. On the other hand, we quantify that despite the 70% increase in cover crop adoption between 2012 and 2022, 31% and 41% of counties had decreasing level of cover crops in 2017 and 2022, respectively, implying potential adoption saturation and concentration of cover crops in fewer counties. The likelihood of disadoption is lower for counties with higher federal conservation payments and participation in crop insurance. Similarly, increasing heat and climate variability are associated with additional cover crop adoption in most regions, indicating their relevance as a climate-resilient strategy, and counties with higher change in precipitation were more likely to maintain cover crop adoption over time, while climate variability was associated with more disadoption in some regions. We conclude that production risks from cover crop adoption could be potentially alleviated with the expansion of federal cost-sharing programs and crop insurance participation; yet, the amount of premium subsidies should be assessed as possibly disincentivizing cover crops due to the potential moral hazard it can trigger and risk-management redundancies of cover crops under crop insurance. Likewise, there is still potential to incentivize cover crop continuity for climate risk management, especially for counties with increasing precipitation variability due to climate change.