Understanding the market for cover crop seeds in the United States: Background and potential policy directions

Previous literature has shown that cover crops have the potential to provide large-scale environmental benefits by reducing soil erosion, preventing nutrient leaching, sequestering carbon (C), and providing habitat for beneficial insects and pollinators (Snapp et al. 2005; Laloy and Bielders 2010; Castellano et al. 2012; Poeplau and Don 2015). In addition, cover crops can potentially generate private benefits to the farm operation by helping boost soil productivity (and subsequent cash crop yields), suppressing weeds, reducing fertilizer needs, and improving nutrient cycling (Bergtold et al. 2019; Myers and Watts 2015; Wittwer et al. 2017).

Given the potential economic and environmental benefits of cover crop adoption, cover crop acreage in the US grew from about 10.3 million ac (4.2 Mha) in 2012 to about 15.4 million ac (6.23 Mha) in 2017 (i.e., a 50% increase), based on data from the US Census of Agriculture (LaRose and Myers 2019). Nonetheless, even in light of these adoption increases, acres planted to cover crops only equal 3.9% of all US cropland in 2017 (Zulauf and Brown 2019) (figure 1). Although there are several possible reasons that overall cover crop adoption rates in the US remain relatively low, one of the main factors that influences the cost of adopting cover crops is cover crop …