Strategies For Increasing Continuous Living Cover Adoption In Minnesota’s Corn-Soybean Systems

Abstract

Continuous living cover, such as cover crops and perennial crops, diversifies annual cropping systems and provides a myriad of environmental and economic benefits. However, adoption of continuous living cover by corn and soybean producers is low. Newly developed winter annual crops, perennial crops, and seeding technology may hold the key to increasing adoption of continuous living cover into annual systems; however, better understanding of the agronomic impacts of these tools is needed before they can be widely deployed onto the landscape. The purpose of this thesis is to clarify the effects of continuous living cover on corn and soybean systems in the Upper Midwest through 1) evaluating techniques that can optimize cover crop establishment into corn-soybean rotations and 2) understanding the tradeoffs of perennial crops in riparian buffers along corn and soybean fields in order to improve economic and environmental outcomes.