Winter Cover Crops Essay

Winter cover crops on agricultural lands have been identified as an essential management practice with the potential to positively impact water quality by reducing the loss of water soluble nutrients, such as a nitrogen nitrate or NO3--N, from the soil due to rain and irrigation, which is also known as nitrogen leaching. Water quality is also positively impacted from sediment transport, or the movement of inorganic and organic particles by gravity and water. These crops serve to capture excess agricultural nutrients following the harvest of summer crops, such as corn and soybeans, and sequester the nutrients until springtime when they can be returned to the soil at the start of the growing season. From prior research and experimentation, cover …show more content…
The cover crops that are planted over the winter protect water quality, reduce potential drainage of residual nitrogen to groundwater following the summer season, provide erosion prevention, carbon sequestration, bioenergy production and nutrient cycling. These crops cover crops protect water quality by recycling unused plant nutrients remaining in the soil from previous summer crop and work all winter to protect fields against wind and water erosion. They also improve soil for the next year’s crop by adding organic matter, suppressing weeds and providing habitats for beneficial insects. Winter cover crops have proven to be an important part of managing nutrient and sediment losses from agricultural lands (Prabhakara, Hively & McCarty et al., 2015). They serve the same purpose as regular cover crops, capturing excess agricultural nutrients following the harvest of the summer crop and sequestering these nutrients until the spring when they can be returned to the soil at the start of the summer growing season. Winter cover crops lessen sedimentation by reducing erosion and the accumulation of nitrogen in aboveground biomass resulted in the reduction of nitrogen runoff (Prabhakara et al.,