On-farm profitability of cover crops in the United States: A meta-analysis

This study addresses the lack of consensus on the economic viability of cover crops for U.S. farmers by analyzing their on-farm operational profits. Using data from 35 studies, we estimated the agronomic and economic impacts of planting cover crops before the main crop. We employ mixed-effects meta-regressions with a multiplicative variance to adjust for variability of cover crop effects, and random effects to adjust for heterogeneity and within-study correlation. Our agronomic findings indicate a modest yield increase for corn, sorghum, and cotton when grown after cover crops, but slight yield reductions for wheat and soybeans. However, economic analysis demonstrates that cover cropping generally results in net profit losses. The magnitude of these losses is influenced by the type of main crop grown after the cover crop. These findings underscore that financial incentives to encourage the adoption of cover crops in the U.S. would be required in order to obtain the environmental benefits of cover crops, such as carbon sequestration.