Rooted in Data – Initial Findings
At this year’s Soil Health Summit, we were excited to present preliminary insights from the data we have been gathering on SHP fields over the last five years. We incorporated as much of the 2018 yield data as we could before the Summit in order to take a look at the impact of cover crops on corn and soybean yields, since cover crops are the most common practice that the farmers who partner with us are trialing on their fields. The data suggested that growing a cover crop didn’t have a statistically significant impact on average corn or soybean yields in our dataset from 2015 through 2018. Though we know this is not true of every farm, no significant difference in yield on average gives us a starting place to begin to look at impacts of cover crops on yield variability and under different weather conditions, as well as to look at the impact of different types of cover crops on yields.
