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Large-scale farmer-led experiment demonstrates positive impact of cover crops on multiple soil health indicators

Nature Food volume 2, pages 97–103 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Cover crops are touted for their potential agronomic and environmental benefits, and are currently incentivized through state, federal and private investment in the USA. There is a need to quantify the impact of on-farm use of cover crops at temporal (2–5 years) and spatial (regional-to-national) scales aligned with such investment programmes. Here we report soil health data from a farmer-led trial of cover crops on 1,522 strip-years, from 78 farms across 9 US states over 5 years. We found that up to 5 years of cover crop use had small but increasing impacts on four of six selected soil health indicators, with active carbon concentration responding the most rapidly. Soil texture, the length of time a field was in the trial and a farm-level random effect were also strongly related to soil health properties. Our results fit with evidence from controlled trials and suggest that the use of cover crops can begin to influence soil health within several years after adoption.

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Fig. 1: Locations of SHP farms.
Fig. 2: Distributions of cover-crop-related changes through time in soil health indicators.
Fig. 3: Year-by-year coefficient plots of statistical models for soil health indicators that were found to change with up to 4 years of cover crops.
Fig. 4: Regression coefficient plots for soil health indicators that were found to change with up to 4 years of cover crops.

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Data availability

The data have not been made publicly available because of a data privacy and use agreement with members of the SHP. Some parts of an aggregated dataset may be available upon request.

Code availability

Code and regression model objects are available through GitHub at https://github.com/swood-ecology/soil-health-partnership.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the farmers involved in the SHP for implementing these trials and sharing their data. We thank the SHP staff for their work designing trials, working with farmers and soil samplers, and collecting data. We thank C. Rasmussen for sharing data that allowed us to generate prior estimates for the relationship between carbon and clay.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA, USA

    Stephen A. Wood

  2. Yale School of the Environment, New Haven, CT, USA

    Stephen A. Wood

  3. Soil Health Partnership, National Corn Growers Association, Chesterfield, MO, USA

    Maria Bowman

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Contributions

S.A.W. and M.B. designed the research; S.A.W. conducted the analysis; S.A.W. wrote the first draft of the paper; S.A.W. and M.B. finalized the paper.

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Correspondence to Stephen A. Wood.

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Peer review information Nature Food thanks Andrea Basche, Steven Culman, Matthew Ruark and Matthew Wallenstein for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–3 and Tables 1–9.

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Wood, S.A., Bowman, M. Large-scale farmer-led experiment demonstrates positive impact of cover crops on multiple soil health indicators. Nat Food 2, 97–103 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00222-y

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