Researchers from North Carolina State University (NC State) Report on Findings in Crop Insurance (Understanding the Effect of Cover Crop Use On Prevented Planting Losses): Agriculture – Crop Insurance

2023 APR 10 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Food Daily News -- Research findings on Agriculture - Crop Insurance are discussed in a new report. According to news reporting out of Raleigh, North Carolina, by NewsRx editors, research stated, “Cover cropping has the potential to improve resilience of agriculture to climate-change-induced extreme weather events. However, rigorous quantitative evidence on the resilience effect of cover crops is still lacking.”

Funders for this research include USDA NIFA Hatch, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from North Carolina State University (NC State), “Using a novel data set that combines satellite-based cover crop information and county-level crop insurance data, we examine the impact of planting cover crops on prevented-planting-related losses that are typically caused by heavy rainfall events. The US federal crop insurance program offers ‘prevented planting’ coverage, which pays indemnities if insured growers are unable to plant their crop due to adverse weather. Linear fixed effects models, instrument-based estimation methods, long-difference models, and a number of other robustness checks are utilized in the empirical analysis to achieve the study objective. Our findings suggest that counties with higher cover crop adoption rates tend to have lower levels of crop insurance losses due to prevented planting. The resulting reduction in prevented planting risk also becomes larger with longer term, multiyear cover crop use. These results support the notion that cover crops improve soil conditions such that the likelihood and magnitude of prevented planting losses decrease.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “We posit that the ability of cover crops to handle excess moisture (i.e., through better water absorption and improved water infiltration in the soil) is the main factor in its ability to reduce prevented planting losses in the US Midwest.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Understanding the Effect of Cover Crop Use On Prevented Planting Losses. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2023. American Journal of Agricultural Economics can be contacted at: Wiley, 111 River St, Hoboken 07030-5774, NJ, USA. (Oxford University Press - http://www.oup.com/; American Journal of Agricultural Economics - ajae.oxfordjournals.org)

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Roderick M. Rejesus, North Carolina State University (NC State), Dept. of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Raleigh, NC, United States. Additional authors for this research include Sunjae Won, Barry K. Goodwin and Serkan Aglasan.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1111/ajae.12396. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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