The role of cover crops in forage production

Cover cropping can provide ecosystem services to farms and communities. Cover crops are broadly defined as crops that provide soil protection and improvement during periods when a cash crop is not present in a field (Clark, 2008; SSSA, 2008). The ecosystem services commonly promoted through cover cropping include regulating services related to soil health, water quality, climate, erosion, and carbon sequestration, as well as supporting services focused on wildlife habitat and maintenance of biological diversity (Blanco-Canqui et al., 2015). One provisioning ecosystem service often overlooked is the material output of forage that is possible from cover crops (Blanco-Canqui et al., 2023). Farmers usually select cover crops for nitrogen fixation, weed suppression, breaking disease cycles, reducing soil erosion, and minimizing nutrient runoff and loss. But more farmers are beginning to focus their cover crop goals on both soil conservation and livestock forage production (Bowman et al., 2024; Blanco-Canqui et al., 2023; Popovici et al., 2023). This is especially true for dairy and feedlot operations: in the USA, 30% of them reported adopting cover crops in the 2017 USDA Census of Agriculture (Bowman et al., 2024). Of these farms, 72% of dairy and 89% of cow-calf operations reported harvesting or grazing at least some of their cover crop acreage for forage (Bowman et al., 2024). Growing cover crops for forage is not only an option for livestock farms but also for cash grain farms that can offer contract-grazing opportunities to local livestock farms seeking winter forage options. An increasing desire to reintegrate crop and livestock production is encouraging these types of beneficial partnerships (Bowman et al., 2024; Roesch-McNally et al., 2018; Sulc and Franzluebbers, 2014). In fact, the expansion of cover cropping across the United States will likely come from increased grazing arrangements between livestock and cash-crop farms (Bowman et al., 2024).