Do you grow cover crops? Make sure you report them to FSA!

It seems you can’t pick up a farm publication or listen to the agriculture news without reading or hearing something about soil health and regenerative agriculture. More and more, farmers and ranchers are undertaking practices such as improved pasture management, no-till crop production and planting cover crops in an effort to improve the health of their soil, better prepare for droughts and floods and help reduce input costs. They are experimenting with different plant species mixtures in their covers, working in some cases to incorporate more livestock to graze cover crops and looking at new marketing opportunities like carbon credits. But with all this energy and focus, one thing often gets over looked by even many of the long-term early adopters of these soil health practices—they never think about the importance of reporting any of their cover crop acres to the USDA Farm Services Agency (FSA).

That needs to change.If you follow the ag news, you probably know by now that earlier this summer USDA announced a new crop insurance premium assistance program for farmers who planted fall cover crops and were in the process of insuring their spring planted program crops (cash crops), called the Pandemic Cover Crop Program (PCCP). This program was an effort to help those producers who undertook the sustained, long-term investment required to plant cover crops during the challenging economic times created by the COVID-19 pandemic with a one-time crop insurance premium support of $5 per acre. The trick was that those cover crop acres that qualified for this program were those that producers reported to FSA using the Report of Acreage form (FSA-578) at the local USDA service center.
Many summer crop producers who wanted to take advantage of this initiative were put in a bind trying to meet an accelerated deadline of turning in previously unreported cover crop acres to FSA. While the deadline for the initial rollout of this program has passed, there has been some discussion on extending it this fall for crops such as winter wheat. Whether or not this happens, the only way a farmer who plants cover crops can take advantage of this or any other potential new program to reward soil health practices is to make sure they have all their information turned in to FSA. That’s why it is so important that, if you do use soil health practices on your land, you make sure to take the additional step of enrolling your cover crop acres using form FSA-578. You need to contact your local USDA service center to make an appointment as soon as you get your covers planted this summer.