No matter why you got into farming, profitability is still the end goal. Every farming practice undergone on your operation must be worth the return on investment. But what if we looked at cover crops in a different way — that covers themselves are the investment?

An article from Bay Nature magazine takes readers inside a climate-controlled laboratory at the Duarte Nursery outside Modesto, where an experiment is taking place that could help determine what food we will eat for decades to come. Rows of steel racks contain numerous tiny almond, apple, walnut, pomegranate, pecan, avocado, fig, and pistachio trees in small translucent plastic cylinders. The saplings, planted in a high-nutrient agar mix that accelerates growth, are no more than two inches high and a few weeks old. Each is being subjected to versions of the stresses experienced just outside these walls in fields across the Central Valley: declining levels of water, escalating levels of salt. The big overarching, if unmentionable, force driving these experiments is climate change, which is beginning to roil the Central Valley.

This year traditional cover crop seed is hard to find. However, corn and soybeans can be considered a cover crop.

The Stiefvaters use cover crops as additional feedstuffs for their 140-head cow-calf operation near Salem, SD.

Farmers around the country are planting cover crops on millions of acres to protect and improve the soil, and the more that farmers use cover crops, the more they value this conservation practice. Cover Crop Economics, a new report published by USDA-SARE looks at the economics of cover crops to help farmers answer that big question: "When do cover crops pay?"

According to a recent survey, Indiana farmers planted more than 1 million acres of cover crops in 2018, up 32,000 acres from the previous year.

U.S. Representatives Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) and Angie Craig (D-MN-02) introduced the bipartisan Feed Emergency Enhancement During Disasters Act (FEEDD Act). The FEEDD Act will provide farmers and ranchers additional emergency flexibility to help alleviate feed shortages during planting seasons with high levels of prevent plant due to extreme moisture or drought.

Join No-till on the Plains, fellow producers and soil health experts July 30 through August 1 for a tour of some of the best farms and farmers in the Texas panhandle.