@article{ea73b1f7c2394fdfa7e4a8f9ac907b22,
title = "Recent Rapid Increase of Cover Crop Adoption Across the U.S. Midwest Detected by Fusing Multi-Source Satellite Data",
abstract = "Cover crops have critical significance for agroecosystem sustainability and have long been promoted in the U.S. Midwest. Knowledge of cover cropping variations and impacts of government policies remains very limited. We developed an accurate and cost-effective approach utilizing satellite fusion data, environmental variables, and machine learning to quantify cover cropping in corn and soybean fields from 2000 to 2021 in the U.S. Midwest. We found that cover crop adoption in most counties was stagnant from 2000 to 2011, but has significantly increased from 2011 to 2021. The adoption of 2021 is four times that of 2011, which was highly correlated to the funding for conservation programs. However, the percentage of cover crop adoption in the U.S. Midwest is still low (7.2%). Our work fills a critical gap in quantifying long-term field-level cover crop adoption at large regions and highlights the potential importance of incentive programs to promote sustainable agricultural practices.",
author = "Qu Zhou and Kaiyu Guan and Sheng Wang and Chongya Jiang and Yizhi Huang and Bin Peng and Zhangliang Chen and Sibo Wang and James Hipple and Dan Schaefer and Ziqi Qin and Samuel Stroebel and Jonathan Coppess and Madhu Khanna and Yaping Cai",
note = "This work was primarily supported by the USDA Risk Management Agency (RMA) under RSA Number RMA20CPT0011222, USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Foundational Program awards (2017‐67013‐26253, 2017‐68002‐26789, 2017‐67003‐28703, 2022‐68013‐37052), US Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency‐Energy (ARPA‐E) SMARTFARM (MBC Lab and SYMFONI) projects, and NSF CAREER Award by Environmental Sustainability Program. This work was also supported in part by the C3. ai Digital Transformation Institute. K.G. and Q.Z. acknowledges the support from the NASA FINESST award. This work also partially funded by Foudation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) Seeding Solutions Award (Grant 602757). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the above U.S. government agencies and FFAR.",
year = "2022",
month = nov,
day = "28",
doi = "10.1029/2022GL100249",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "49",
journal = "Geophysical Research Letters",
issn = "0094-8276",
publisher = "John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.",
number = "22",
}