Cover crops
Cover crops are plants grown primarily to protect and enhance the soil between periods of regular crop production. By improving soil health, increasing organic matter, and reducing erosion, cover crops are an essential tool in sustainable agriculture. Their ability to suppress weeds, improve water retention, and boost soil fertility makes them a valuable practice for both conventional and organic farming systems.
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What Are Cover Crops?[edit | edit source]
Cover crops are typically planted during the off-season when fields would otherwise be bare. Unlike cash crops grown for profit, cover crops are not harvested for their market value. Instead, they are planted to maintain or improve the quality of the soil for future crops.
Common types of cover crops include:
- Legumes such as clover and alfalfa, which fix nitrogen in the soil.
- Grasses like rye, oats, and barley, which are effective at preventing erosion and improving soil structure.
- Brassicas like radishes and turnips, which break up compacted soil and improve water infiltration.
Benefits of Cover Crops[edit | edit source]
Cover crops offer a wide range of benefits for soil health, crop productivity, and environmental sustainability.
In agriculture, cover crops are plants that are planted to cover the soil rather than for the purpose of being harvested. Cover crops manage soil erosion, soil fertility, soil quality, water, weeds, pests, diseases, biodiversity and wildlife in an agroecosystem—an ecological system managed and shaped by humans. Cover crops can increase microbial activity in the soil, which has a positive effect on nitrogen availability, nitrogen uptake in target crops, and crop yields. Cover crops reduce water pollution risks and remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Cover crops may be an off-season crop planted after harvesting the cash crop. Cover crops are nurse crops in that they increase the survival of the main crop being harvested, and are often grown over the winter. In the United States, cover cropping may cost as much as $35 per acre.
Benefits[edit | edit source]
Cover crops offer many benefits, including:
- Slowing erosion
- Improving soil quality
- Improving the availability of soil moisture and soil nutrients
- Suppressing weeds (a form of weed control
- Helping the control of certain pests
These benefits accumulate over time. Through sustained use in a farming context, they help to reduce costs and improve output, thus increasing profits. By increasing the health of soil and crops, they aid the environmental sustainability and financial sustainability of the farm.
See also[edit | edit source]
Resources[edit | edit source]
Managing Cover Crops Profitably, 2nd Edition - Download this 212 page book free as a PDF file.
"Managing Cover Crops Profitably" explores how and why cover crops work and provides all the information needed to build cover crops into any farming operation. This is the most comprehensive book ever published on the use of cover crops to sustain cropping systems and build soil.
http://www.sare.org/publications/covercrops.htm
