We are so excited by our Cover 5 project and what we’ve accomplished since November 2017. We’ve noticed, within the soil health movement, that much of the information on soil health is geared toward bigger operators. The USDA-NRCS in South Carolina wanted us to partner with farmers who didn’t exactly fit the mold of a big operator, but were primarily small, minority farmers or vegetable/truck crop farmers.
In this project, we have partnered with a diverse group (row crop, vegetable, cattle, conventional, organic, you name it!) of farmers who have agreed to cover five acres (hence the name Cover5) or less of their land in cover crops for the next 3 years. In the fall of 2017, we met with 9 farmers who successfully planted cool season cover crops (we got to them really late in November) and it looks like many of them are so impressed with cover, they will follow up with warm season cover on the same land! We will follow the stories of these farmers over the next 30 months with blogs and video, as we watch how their soils change and their thinking evolves over the duration of this project!
>> Click here << to watch videos in our Cover 5 series as well as from our other current project, Farmer Scientists!