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

Despite cover crops been widely promoted for their on and off-farm benefits, their adoption is both low nationally and diminishing in some areas. Existing research has examined a suite of factors affecting the adoption of cover crops in the United States, yet understanding the role of multiple government programs and climate changes has not been fully investigated over time, especially across a national sample. Furthermore, the factors associated with cover crop disadoption have not yet been explored nationally. To fill these gaps in the literature, we combine multiple publicly available data sources to estimate the role of multiple government programs (i.e., crop insurance, state, conservation and working-lands programs) and weather and climate change conditions on county cover crop adoption and disadoption. First, we find that increasing crop insurance participation is associated with increasing cover crop adoption nationally and in the Midwest and Northeast, while increasing insurance premium subsidies are correlated with reduced cover crop adoption in the Midwest and increasing in the Southwest. Second, working-lands payments (including EQIP, CSP and commodity) are highly correlated with cover crop adoption in every region except the Northwest, although exclusively during the 2012-2017 period, when EQIP aggressively expanded cost-sharing cover crops. Third, cover crops might have been implemented as a climate-resilience strategy although constrained by a region’s particular agricultural system. For instance, increasing temperature variability is correlated with higher cover crop adoption in the Western regions, while water deficits are associated with more cover crops in the Midwest but lower cover crops in the Southeast. Finally, we quantify that 31% and 41% of counties had decreasing level of cover crops in 2017 and 2022, respectively, implying potential adoption saturation and concentration in fewer counties. Regionally, the probability of cover crop disadoption increases with land-retirement payments in the Northwest, insurance participation in the Southeast, and insurance subsidies in the Midwest, while it decreases with working-lands payments in the Midwest. 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 in the Midwest due to moral hazard triggers and risk-management redundancies under both practices.