Understanding the effect of cover crop use on prevented planting losses

Cover cropping has the potential to improve resilience of agriculture climate-change-induced extreme weather events. However, rigorous quantitative evidence on effect cover crops is still lacking. Using a novel data set that combines satellite-based crop information and county-level insurance data, we examine impact planting prevented-planting-related losses are typically caused by heavy rainfall The US federal program offers “prevented planting” coverage, which pays indemnities if insured growers unable plant their due adverse weather. Linear fixed effects models, instrument-based estimation methods, long-difference number other robustness checks utilized in empirical analysis achieve study objective. Our findings suggest counties with higher adoption rates tend have lower levels prevented planting. resulting reduction risk also becomes larger longer term, multiyear use. These results support notion soil conditions such likelihood magnitude decrease. We posit ability handle excess moisture (i.e., through better water absorption improved infiltration soil) main factor its reduce Midwest.