Encouraging cover crops with crop insurance

Iowa is a nationwide leader in a conservation practice known as cover cropping. For nearly a decade, increases in cover crop incentives have resulted in increases in cover crop adoption among Iowa farmers. The recently introduced “Cover Act” should be a part of the 2023 Farm Bill to encourage even more farmers.

Cover cropping is a conservation strategy that has proved highly successful in promoting soil health and water quality. A cover crop is what it sounds like — a crop (like winter rye) that covers farmland when there are no other crops planted.

Like a blanket, the growth of a cover crop prevents runoff from snowmelt or heavy rainfalls. Cover crops allow the soil, along with all of its nutrients and microbial composition, to be held in place.

This leads to higher margins for farmers with greater yields and lower input costs for treatments like fertilizer. There are many more benefits, but all in all, cover crops serve the dual purpose of conserving soil and water and making farming more profitable.

At the federal level, the National Resource Conservation Services (NRCS) offers the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP). At the state level, there is the Water Quality Initiative (WQI) which administers funds directly through local Soil and Water Conservation Districts. Private organizations have begun offering cost-share for cover crop use as well.

However, they all have limits to the number of years that a farmer can receive payments and/or the number of acres eligible for payments. Therefore, while they certainly help increase adoption rates, these programs are slowing in impact as more and more farmers have already reached their year or acre limitations.

We need to succeed in incentivizing farmers to grow cover crops at any scale for long periods of time. One of the best ways to do this is to provide an incentive through the crop insurance system that almost all Iowa farmers use.

Cover crop insurance incentive programs recognize that farmers who plant cover crops are less likely to have crop failures, and so, logically, offer a discount on crop insurance.

This concept started in Iowa and has worked extremely well here. Iowa is now in its fifth year accepting applications for the Cover Crop Insurance Discount, which takes $5/acre off a farmer's crop insurance premiums.

In 2021, the U.S. government followed Iowa’s model with the Pandemic Cover Crop Program by offering farmers around the nation $5/acre subsidy for crop insurance if planting cover crops. However, being COVID-related, this program will soon expire.

Just this week, U.S. Rep. Sean Casten (IL-06) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) introduced the Conservation Opportunity and Voluntary Environment Resilience Program (COVER) Act which would make the $5/acre federal Cover Crop Insurance Discount permanent.

By pairing highly-utilized crop insurance with growing cover crop adoption, the COVER Act is a big step to continue the growth of cover crops in Iowa to meet our state’s water quality and soil health goals.

Aaron Lehman is the president of the Iowa Farmers Union and is a fifth-generation farmer from central Iowa.

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