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Home / Business News / Agriculture News

For Iowa farmers, profiting from cover crops may unlock potential

Erin JordanBy: Erin Jordan May. 17, 2019 7:00 am Updated: May. 22, 2019 2:29 pm
For Iowa farmers, profiting from cover crops may unlock potentialFor Iowa farmers, profiting from cover crops may unlock potentialFor Iowa farmers, profiting from cover crops may unlock potentialFor Iowa farmers, profiting from cover crops may unlock potentialFor Iowa farmers, profiting from cover crops may unlock potential

Iowa nearly doubled its acres of cover crops between 2015 and 2017, but the share of farmland with the offseason crops that reduce pollutants flowing into waterways still is less than 4 percent, new data show.

As the government spends tens of millions of dollars subsidizing cover crops, farmers and experts wonder if they instead should encourage offseason cover crops that can be harvested for a profit — not just killed off before the traditional cash crop is planted.

Terry Ward, 68, of La Porte City, will harvest a rye crop in June and turn it into food for 125 heifers he feeds for a local dairy farmer. Once the rye is gone, Ward will sow soybeans, a practice known as double cropping because he gets two crops from the same land in one year.

'We think it's cost effective because we get a year's worth of feed and a crop besides,' Ward said. 'We had 51 bushels per acre (of soybeans) last year, which we think is pretty good.'

Slow growth in cover crop adoption

Iowa had 907,000 acres planted in cover crops over the 2017-2018 winter season, or about 3.9 percent of all farmed acres, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Working Group's 2017 cover crop study of Iowa, Illinois and Indiana. This is up from 592,000 acres, or 2.6 percent of Iowa's farmed land, in 2015-2016.

'I think it's pretty amazing they doubled the footprint,' said Soren Rundquist, the group's spatial analysis director and study coordinator. 'But the sobering reality is that 1 million acres is just a drop in the bucket.'

Erin Jordan

Erin Jordan

Investigative Reporter, The Gazette

I'm a Cedar Rapids Gazette investigative reporter.

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