Wisconsin Cover Crop Data Network

Since 2020, this project, a collaboration between partners from Michael Fields, UW-Madison, The Nature Conservancy, and over 100 farmers from over 60 counties around the state, has addressed the need for locally relevant information on cover cropping as a key strategy to build soil health and protect water quality in Wisconsin.

For a fifth year in a row, participating farmers are sharing information on their cover crop practices as well as motivations, sources of support, and perceived benefits and barriers to cover cropping. They are also gathering fall and spring biomass samples and mailing them into labs for analysis.

In return for sharing their practices and cover crop data with us, we provide our collaborating farmers with personalized reports on the amount of biomass their cover crop produced as well as forage and nutrient information. As a participatory research effort, we are learning from growers about benefits, challenges, and results and aim to use this data to inform policy, research, and outreach to develop workable cover cropping strategies in Wisconsin’s diverse cropping systems, soil types, and microclimates. We are also aggregating this information from around the state into other cover crop data sets, including region wide, to foster on-farm use of cover crops and also improve decision support tools like SnapPlus.