In the 1990s, the Maryland Department of Agriculture began incentivizing the use of cover crops, enticing farmers to plant things like clover and winter rye during the off-season to prevent erosion and mitigate nutrient runoff into the Chesapeake Bay. During the last 30 years, University of Maryland Extension (UME) has been at the forefront of the effort to protect water quality through innovative agricultural practices, like cover cropping, making Maryland’s agricultural industry a model for other states.
Today, UME agents are working with farm operations across the state to take this practice one step further with site-specific planting choices that provide agronomic and environmental benefits for the land.
Frederick County Agriculture and Food Systems (AgFS) agent Mark Townsend is leading this work in western Maryland in partnership with agents across the state to assist farmers in transitioning from the idea of cover crops as a defensive conservation practice for Bay water quality, to an offensive tactic to benefit on-farm soil health and productivity.
“We want to shift the growers mindset away from seeing cover crops as a conservation tactic to protect waterways, and have them think about cover crops for weed control, for long-term fertility, or for pest control,” said Townsend, who was recently awarded a National Fish and Wildlife Service (NFWS) Innovative Nutrient and Sediment Reduction grant for more than $500,000 to initiate site-specific planting and management of cover crops.
The project expands on work already occurring on the Eastern Shore under AgFS agent Sarah Hirsh. “Ideally each farmer should have different cover crops going across different fields if they’re thinking about them intentionally,” Hirsh said in a 2023 interview in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources alumni magazine. “I work with the farmers to talk about the history of the field and the issues it might have…Then, together with the farmer, we try to design the best cover crop that makes sense for that particular field.”
Townsend intends to recruit approximately 35 farmers of varying agricultural businesses including grain and vegetable growers, small and urban farms, and even livestock operations. “With Dr. Amanda Grev, we’ve done a lot of research in integrating annual cover crops into perennial systems for forage, so we are interested in pulling some of the farms who haven’t traditionally been involved in cover cropping under the state initiatives. Then they can have an understanding of how cover crops can benefit their operations as well,” Townsend said.
Operations that choose to participate in the three-year project, a collaboration with Future Harvest and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRISS) at Colorado State University, will receive a tailored cover crop solution for their farm, as well as a stipend to employ these new tactics on their land.
“The approach isn’t novel, but it’s a change in management. We’re taking what’s already been done – good science that currently exists – and applying it to a grower’s circumstance. There are a lot of nuances that exist in the cover crop realm. Everyone has a little different of an operation – different equipment, different techniques for planting and harvesting, different timing – and those nuances become very technical,” Townsend said. “We’re not doing an outlandish trial; we’re doing what we know works and simply changing and tweaking things to suit the farm operation.”
The participating farms will also be surveyed by the IRISS team at Colorado State University to provide an awareness of how information is learned and transferred through the personal social networks of farm communities.
“We’re a small state and the ag industry is even smaller,” said Townsend. “We know that farmers learn more from each other than we can teach them, but we want to know how they do it.”
This knowledge will allow agents to take advantage of these networks by tailoring learning opportunities like workshops and classes to the needs of the farmers themselves. “This will be informative to determine how we can alter or augment our teaching styles and programs,” Townsend said.
The cover crop project will work with the same operations over the next three years to determine the best cover cropping strategies for the farm’s needs and geographical area. While IRISS investigates how those farms gather and utilize new information, Townsend and his colleagues will be monitoring the environmental outcomes for the farm and its land, as well as the environmental benefits for the watershed and the microbial communities in the soil.
“The goal here is to deliver a demonstrative program to show farmers long-term benefits that pay off,” Townsend said. “Long-term, cover crops have the potential to reduce input costs like herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer. And frankly, they’ll make more money based on those changes.”