What motivates farmers to adopt more sustainable practices in Indiana? Indiana is a very agriculturally focused state with large-scale industrial farming operations contributing largely to our state’s economy, as well as our state’s carbon emissions and pollution. What is it going to take to motivate these industrial farmers to change their routine that has been working so well for them for the sake of sustainability? This is what I wanted to study by focusing on a specific sustainable practice: cover cropping.
Cover crops are crops planted for the health of the soil rather than for consumption or profit. Farmers will harvest their cash crops, such as corn or soybeans, and sell them. Then, instead of leaving their fields bare in the off-season they will plant an additional crop that is not for harvest to keep the fields covered. Cover crops help maintain soil structure and reduce erosion. Different species of cover crops can help improve nutrient content in the soil as well as assist with weed and pest management.
Cover crops have numerous benefits, but many farmers still do not plant them due to time and money constraints. Farmers can actually experience a deficit in the first few years of cover cropping because of the added costs of planting an additional crop to the cash crop which causes many of them to abandon the practice. In response to this, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has formed cost share funding programs to help farmers fund the initial implementation of sustainable practices on their farms. This then leads me to my research question.
What is the relationship between monetary factors and cover crop acreage in Indiana?
I evaluated two monetary factors in the study. The first was the amount of cost share funding provided by the Indiana State Department of Agriculture (ISDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in each of the 92 counties in Indiana from 2014 to 2019.
The second is the prices of the three major cash crops in Indiana: corn, soybeans, and winter wheat. I had two hypotheses for this study. The first claimed that cost share funding would have the greatest influence on cover crop acreage out of all the variables I studied. The funding farmers can receive from cost share programs can help them overcome the initial deficit they encounter when cover cropping and be able to plant more acres.
My second hypothesis claimed that corn prices would have a greater influence on cover crop acreage than soybean or winter wheat prices. The basis for this is that corn is Indiana’s largest cash crop. Years with higher corn selling prices result in more farmers having a surplus of income that can be put towards sustainable practices such as cover cropping.
Using the statistical analysis program R I ran a linear regression model to evaluate how these monetary variables affected cover crop acreage in each county from 2014 to 2019.
There are two main findings of this study. The first is that cost share funding has the strongest effect on cover crop acreage out of all the variables in this study in all counties in Indiana. Figures 1 and 2 show the cover crop acreage and cost share funding provided in Indiana from 2014 to 2019. From these figures there is no clear indication that one is a direct result of the other and the two variables only had a correlation coefficient of 0.309.
However, a sample of the acres planted specifically through the Indiana State Department of Agriculture programs and the cost share funding had a correlation coefficient of 0.92. This indicates that cost share funding is directly effective in increasing cover crops planted by farmers who partake in funding programs provided by the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
The second finding is that out of the selling prices for the three main cash crops grown in Indiana, corn appears to have the most significant positive effect on total cover crop acreage in each county. However, the model created for this second finding has proved to be an inaccurate representation of the observations between the variables. Therefore, these results are inconclusive.
My findings suggest that expanding cost share funding programs could directly result in farmers planting more cover crops. While the results of my second hypothesis were inconclusive, they do suggest that there is a potential relationship between the yearly cost of a state’s main cash crop and cover crop acreage.
Out of the two main variables affecting cover crop acreage, I chose to focus on the monetary variable. Future researchers could focus on the time variable to determine the strength of its influence on cover crop acreage in comparison to monetary variables.
Amanda Chadwell is a senior at the Indiana University O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs studying Environmental Management. She plans to graduate in May 2022 and pursue a career in soil conservation. She would like to thank her advisors Dr. Landon Yoder and Dr. Mallory Barnes for their guidance and support throughout this research process.
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