FAIRMONT – Martin County area farmers, thanks to programs to cost-share implementation, are adopting cover crops at a fast rate.

Martin County Soil and Water Conservation District Outreach Coordinator Jesse Walters said cover crops are planted on a field towards the end of a cash crop’s growth season, around August through October.

“They’ll plant what we call a cover crop,” he said. “Any type of plant that’ll then grow a little bit in the fall, establish a root system, then in the spring start growing, and get some above-ground growth that’s noticeable ahead of planting that next year’s cash crop of corn or soybeans.”

The main point of a cover crop, according to Walters, is reducing erosion.

“You saw a lot here in May this year,” he said. “We had a lot of real tough wind that saw a lot of those dust clouds blowing all the way from New Ulm to here to Worthington. If you looked at fields that had a cover crop on them, something green growing with the root system established, they weren’t losing sediment to wind erosion.”

The most common cover crop is winter cereal rye, which Walters said is quick to establish compared to other options.

“After you seed it, it’s going to start getting some green growth right away,” he said. “It’s pretty hardy as far as drought tolerance, heat, cold. It’s definitely one of the hardier ones. It’s got a nice fiber short system, which helps with improving your soil structure and soil health, but it also grows pretty uniformly. As far as if you’re going to use it for grazing or for feed, it seems to bale pretty well. If not, you seem to be able to terminate it pretty easily. Some aren’t as easy to terminate, so it’s one of the easier ones to use, especially for beginners.”

However, Walters said it is not the only option, and other mixes of crops provide different benefits.

“You can use these different plants to accomplish different things for your soil,” he said. “Some of them are going to grow really fibrous roots, some are going to grow tap roots that will help with nutrient cycling, some are going to fixate atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into a usable form of nitrogen in the soil, which is essentially a fertilizer. They can be used for a lot of things.”

While the University of Minnesota has lab farms it uses to test erosion with different types of cover crops and no cover crops, Walters said the wind storms in May gave him a chance to see the difference visually.

“I happened to be out doing site checks and taking photos of fields that we provided cost share to do some cover crops,” he said. “There was a very obvious difference between the field that had a cover crop on it and one that was black.”

Black means that the fields are just tilled between cash crops, which is also still very common today.

“You’d take your corn or soybeans off, you would do some tillage, so that field would then be black or partially black,” Walters said. “That worked, and still works fine, but some guys started to think about how they want to address this timeframe between cash crops, where we’re going months and months without any living root in the soil, and that’s what pushed some guys to start using cover crops.”

When Walters started around 10 years ago, he said very few people used cover crops. Just in the last six years or so, those numbers have changed drastically.

“In 2020 my notes showed that for cover crops we cost-shared close to 500 acres total throughout the entire county,” Walters said. “This year we’re still not done signing up people for cost share, but so far we have over 4,000 acres contracted for the 2026 fall.”

That’s almost 4,000 football fields worth of farmland using cover crops. Even so, Walters said there’s roughly around 400,000 acres. Part of the reason cover crops are not widely adopted, even as cost shares are available and adoption continues to increase, is simply evaluation of need.

“Some of these other counties and states have far less topsoil than we have before they hit a confining layer,” he said. “Rock or clay or something that’s really not good for raising crops. They really have to protect the remaining inches of topsoil they have, whereas we were blessed by the glaciers; we have feet of topsoil, we have very productive soil here. The necessity, or at least the depiction of necessity, is less here than it is in a hilly, more sandy area.”

On top of this, Walters said cover crops are still a fairly new practice, and farmers not having any issues with their current methods don’t really have a desire to fix what is working fine.

As for where this is all headed, Walters said optimistically they are looking to see adoption continue to increase, ideally up to at least 25 percent, or 100,000 acres, of Martin County farmland using cover crops. Realistically, he said he sees more and more producers finding ways to use cover crops to fix problems on their farms.

“The more we learn about it, the more ways people are going to find to use it,” Walters said. “A person might buy a new farm and say, ‘Hey, I want to kind of reset this farm, I want to get soil health where it should be, I want to build up my organic matter, I want to x, y, z.’ I think you’re going to see them use cover crops to do some of that now. Some people already are, but I think the more people that are doing it and the success they’re seeing, the word’s gonna spread.”

For more information, visit martinswcd.net/, visit the office at 923 North State St, Suite 110 or call 507-235-6680 ext. 4.