Recent rapid increase of cover crop adoption across the U.S. Midwest detected by fusing multi-source satellite data

Cover crops have critical significance for agroecosystem sustainability and have been long promoted in the U.S. Midwest. Knowledge of the variations of cover cropping and the impacts of government policies remains very limited. We developed an accurate and cost-effective approach utilizing multi-source satellite fusion data, environmental variables, and machine learning to quantify cover cropping in corn and soybean fields from 2000 to 2021 in the U.S. Midwest. We found that cover crop adoption in most counties has significantly increased in the recent 11 years from 2011 to 2021. The adoption percentage of the year 2021 is 3.3 times that of the year 2011, primarily driven by federal and state conservation programs. Particularly, the year 2021 has rapidly increased 63.6% of planting acreage compared to 2020, however, the percentage is still low (7.2%). Our work highlights the importance of incentives from the public and private sectors on promoting sustainable agricultural practices.