Cover crops, with their ability to reduce erosion and promote soil health, are being planted on more land in the Midwest than ever before. That's according to new research from the University of Illinois, showing that adoption of coverage crops reached 7.2% in 2021, up from just 1.8% a decade earlier.

The discovery is the result of sophisticated satellite remote sensing efforts that accurately detected cover crops on 140 million acres of farmland and tracked their expansion over 20 years. The article "Recent rapid increase in the adoption of coverage crops in the Midwest detected by the fusion of satellite data from various sources" was published in Geophysical Research Letters.  

"It is impossible to do field studies throughout the Midwest. Therefore, remote sensing can provide a cost-effective approach to detecting cover crops. We can monitor each field from the beginning to the end of the year, which gives us a clear picture of what happened over time," says Qu Zhou, lead author of the study and phD student in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. (NRES), part of the Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. Zhou is supervised by Kaiyu Guan, associate professor at NRES, founding director of the Center for Agroecosystem Sustainability and lead author of the study.

The increase in the adoption of coverage crops occurs in a scenario of increased state and federal incentive programs, a statistically significant factor, according to the study. "We observed the vegetation cover area each year with the funding of that year and found that it is highly correlated. We also check investments in different states, showing that some states have higher percentages of coverage crops related to their financial investment," says Sheng Wang, assistant professor of research at NRES and co-author of the study.

Source: Agrolink