Voluntary wintertime cover crop adoption up 5 percent in Arkansas
Dec. 15, 2025
By John Lovett
University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture
Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station
Fast facts
- Soybean-to-soybean rotation most common after cover crops
- Government support and voluntary planting tended to rise together
- Research aids policy decisions on cover crop incentives
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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Using satellite imagery and government data, researchers measured a 5 percent increase in voluntary, or non-subsidized, cover crop adoption by Arkansas farmers.
The finding came out of research seeking to pinpoint how farmers were using cover crops and where, to help policymakers develop more targeted incentives for using cover crops.
Planted over the winter months between cash crops, cover crops such as clover, oats and rye can mitigate soil erosion, improve soil health, water and nutrient retention, and provide weed and pest management options, according to research done by the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.
Using data from 2013-2019, agricultural economists with the experiment station showed that cover crop adoption in Arkansas had the greatest association with a soybean-to-soybean cash crop rotation. This is no small thing: Soybeans are economically significant in Arkansas, accounting for $2.3 billion in cash farm receipts in 2023, according to the Arkansas Agriculture Profile.
Identifying the trends in what cash crops are grown with cover crops was “the real novelty of this study,” said Lanier Nalley, corresponding author and head of the department of agricultural economics and agribusiness for the Division of Agriculture and the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences.
“With GPS coordinates from National Resource Conservation Service, we knew where cover crops were being grown for government payments, but the literature is very sparse, specifically in the South, about what crops are being rotated with cover crops,” Nalley added.
The period of 2013 to 2019 was the latest available data at the time of the study covering the entirety or parts of 27 Arkansas counties in the Arkansas Delta.
Merely estimating cover crop acreage would have been insufficient, Nalley explained, because it would give no insight into how cover crops fit into cropping rotations, or their effectiveness.
Published in the Public Library of Science journal PLOS One under the title “Satellite Remote Sensing Reveals Voluntary Cover-Crop Adoption and Crop-Rotation Hotspots in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain,” Nalley and his co-authors report that government support and voluntary planting tended to rise together, showing a positive relationship between the two.
The increase in voluntary cover crop adoption can be attributed to one of two things, Nalley said. It could be due to farmers who previously received government payments who decided to continue growing cover crops while avoiding the cumbersome record-keeping and application requirements for the government subsidies. Or it could be a “spillover effect,” when farmers adopt the practice after seeing a neighboring farmer’s benefits of planting cover crops.
“An interesting thing for me was seeing how many people are just doing this because they realize the economic and environmental benefits and don't even need government payments,” Nalley said. “They are doing this for either profit maximization or land stewardship maximization.”
Filling the gap
Despite expansion in federal funding for incentives to encourage farmers to adopt cover crops since 2012, Nalley said the growth in subsidized versus voluntary adoption of cover crops remained unknown due to challenges in obtaining ground-truthed spatial data and a reliable method for identifying voluntary adoption.
The lead author of the study was Zobaer Ahmed, Ph.D., when he was a senior research assistant at the University of Arkansas Center for Advanced Spatial Research. Ahmed is now the director of research and evaluation for the New York City major’s office. The project was supported by an NRCS grant awarded to Aaron Shew, a former assistant professor of agricultural economics with the Division of Agriculture. Shew, who was also a co-author of the study, is now the chief technology officer at Acres, a mapping and land analysis company.
“The initial push was finding out what cash crops were associated with cover crops,” Nalley said. “But Zobaer is so good at this kind of work, I said, ‘Well, if we know how many acres of cover crops are in a county that are government-subsidized, let’s just find out how many total acres of cover crops are in a county, and the difference would be those people who aren't getting government payments for it.’”
Subsidized vs. voluntary
Both government-supported and voluntarily planted cover crops became common in the study region over time. NRCS data showed government-funded cover crop acres were very low at first — about 9,600 acres in 2013 — and stayed low through 2017. But they jumped sharply in 2018 to more than 94,000 acres, and even higher in 2019, reaching about 201,000 acres.
In the same study region, voluntary cover crops increased by about 5 percent, adding roughly 36,000 more acres.
The researchers found that government support and voluntary planting tended to rise together, showing a positive relationship between the two.
Cash crop trends
The data also evaluated trends in the frequency of major cash crops grown before and after winter cover crops over time.
Over the study period, the share of soybeans in the study area planted the season before winter cover crops rose from approximately 4.75 percent to a high of about 8 percent in 2018 before slipping to around 6 percent in 2019.
The frequency of cotton and corn crops being planted before winter cover crops also increased between 2013 and 2019 but to a lesser degree.
When looking exclusively at what cash crops were planted after cover crops, a similar trend emerged. By 2019, 6 percent of soybean acres were planted after winter cover crops, an increase of 2 percent over 2013. Again, the share of corn and cotton acreage planted after cover crops also increased from approximately 0.25 percent each to about 1.75 percent for corn and just over 2 percent for cotton.
When looking at year-to-year crop rotations, both with and without the use of cover crops, the researchers found that a soybean-to-soybean rotation without cover crops was the most frequent pattern, representing 21 percent of acreage in the study area in 2013 and dropping slightly to 18 percent in 2019.
The soybean-to-soybean rotation with cover crops represented 2 percent of acreage in 2013 and growing to 3 percent in 2019.
During the study period, the average total soybean cropland was about 3.2 million acres. Rice followed with about 1.3 million acres, then corn with 700,000 acres, and cotton with 400,000 acres.
How they did it
Nalley’s team of researchers overcame several technical obstacles to produce the results for this study, including occasional GPS inaccuracies for specific cover crop locations.
Google Earth Engine and NASA Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager Top of Atmosphere sensing was used in combination with the USDA-NRCS cover crop dataset to obtain pixel-based image identification of cover crops. The Landsat 8 offered 30-meter spatial and 16-day temporal resolution remote sensing. With a cropland data layer, the data allowed using a pixel-based method to identify cover crops.
The ground cover months of November to March were used to identify the cover crop areas. To adhere to USDA-NRCS data-sharing agreements and to ensure data privacy, classified acreages to identify crop rotation and cover crops were aggregated at the county level for subsequent mapping activities.
Cloud cover was eliminated from the NASA Landsat 8 satellite data, and a machine learning algorithm was used to identify the cover crop area with multiple spectral reflectance bands and indices.
The research was supported by a grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service and through a partnership program with Acres.
Co-authors of the study also included Lawson Connor, assistant professor, and Mike Popp, Harold F. Ohlendorf Professor of agricultural economics and agribusiness, both in the department of agricultural economics and agribusiness; Kris Brye, University Professor of applied soil physics and pedology in the crop, soil and environmental sciences department; and Steven Green, professor of soil and water conservation with Arkansas State University’s College of Agriculture and the Division of Agriculture.
For more information on cover crop use, see Understanding Cover Crops and Cover Crops Training for Producers.
To learn more about the Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website. Follow us on X at @ArkAgResearch, subscribe to the Food, Farms and Forests podcast and sign up for our monthly newsletter, the Arkansas Agricultural Research Report. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit uada.edu. Follow us on X at @AgInArk. To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit uaex.uada.edu.
About the Division of Agriculture
The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s mission is to strengthen agriculture, communities, and families by connecting trusted research to the adoption of best practices. Through the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service, the Division of Agriculture conducts research and extension work within the nation’s historic land grant education system.
The Division of Agriculture is one of 20 entities within the University of Arkansas System. It has offices in all 75 counties in Arkansas and faculty on three system campuses.
Pursuant to 7 CFR § 15.3, the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture offers all its Extension and Research programs and services (including employment) without regard to race, color, sex, national origin, religion, age, disability, marital or veteran status, genetic information, sexual preference, pregnancy or any other legally protected status, and is an equal opportunity institution.
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Media Contact: John Lovett
U of A System Division of Agriculture
Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station
(479) 763-5929
jlovett@uada.edu