Cover crop adoption and disadoption: The role of agricultural policies, climate, and regional dynamics

Despite cover crops being widely promoted due to their private and social 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 change has not been fully investigated over time, especially across a national sample. Furthermore, the factors associated with cover crop disadoption nationally have not yet been explored. To fill these gaps in the literature, we combine several publicly available data sources to estimate the role of multiple government programs (i.e., crop insurance, state, conservation, and commodity 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 is correlated with reduced cover crop adoption in the Midwest and increased adoption in the Southwest. Second, working-lands payments (including the Environmental Quality Incentives Program [EQIP], Conservation Stewardship Program [CSP], and commodity) are highly correlated with cover crop adoption in every region except the Northwest, although exclusively during 2012 to 2017, when EQIP expanded cost-sharing for cover crops substantially. Third, our analysis suggests that cover crops might have been implemented as a climate-resilience strategy, although the practice is likely constrained by a region’s particular agricultural system. For instance, increasing temperature variability is correlated with higher cover crop adoption in the Western region, while water deficits are associated with higher cover crop adoption in the Midwest but lower cover crop adoption in the Southeast. Finally, we quantify that 31% and 41% of counties had decreasing levels of cover crop adoption 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; however, 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.