Understanding the effect of cover crop use on prevented planting losses
利用卫星数据和县级作物保险数据，研究发现覆盖作物采用率越高的县，因暴雨导致的无法播种保险损失越低，且长期使用效果更显著，为农业适应气候变化提供了证据。
Abstract 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. 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. 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.