Farmers and environmental advocates warn conservation efforts could stall without it.
By JENNIFER BAMBERG
Investigate Midwest
jennifer.bamberg@investigatemidwest.org
SPRINGFIELD — When Steve Stierwalt studied agriculture at the University of Illinois in the 1970s, soil health wasn’t commonly taught or discussed. Faculty often told their young farming students to put all their faith in commercial fertilizers.
But over his 40 years as a corn and soybean farmer in Champaign County, Stierwalt said soil erosion, which can cause fertilizer and manure runoff to end up in nearby rivers and streams, has become an increasingly serious problem.
“When we plowed, we plowed pretty much everything,” except for a row near the fence line, Stierwalt said. “The grass near the fence row kept getting taller, it seemed to me. I came to understand that it wasn’t the fence row getting taller, it was the soil in the fields that was getting shorter.”
In the early 2010s, Stierwalt started experimenting with cover crops, which can help hold soil in place and reduce runoff pollution.
“This valuable resource that we take for granted, we were letting it get away,” Stierwalt said. “We have some of the best soil in the world here, and we have to protect it.”
Six years ago, Illinois became the second state in the nation to offer subsidies to farmers for planting cover crops in the fall, an effort to reverse its status as one of the worst states for agriculture runoff. Demand for the Fall Cover for Spring Savings program — which offers a $5 per acre discount on the following year’s crop insurance premiums — has outpaced state funding every year since.
However, despite the program’s popularity and calls from environmentalists and farmers for its funding to increase, Gov. JB Pritzker has proposed a 31% funding cut.
Pritzker, a Democrat, recently proposed an overall $2 billion increase to next year’s state budget. But he also recommended cuts to several programs, including reducing the cover crop insurance credit budget from $960,000 to $660,000.
Pritzker’s office did not comment but the governor referenced program cuts in a recent address.
“I have made difficult decisions — including to programs I have championed, which is hard for me,” Pritzker said during his State of the State and budget address in February.
Two state lawmakers introduced bills this legislative session to increase the program’s annual funding to $6.1 million. They say it’s crucial to support the practice, which will benefit communities in Illinois and beyond.
The bills did not clear a recent committee deadline. However, lawmakers can still negotiate funding for the program as they continue to work to pass a budget by the end of May.
Illinois is one of the leading states for farm fertilizer runoff and one of the top contributors to the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone, a barren area of around 4,500 square miles of coastal waters deadly to fish, shrimp and other marine life. It costs the region’s fishing and tourism industry millions annually.
Runoff from Illinois farms has only worsened, according to a 2023 state study. From 2017-21, average nitrate-nitrogen loads increased by 4.8%, and total phosphorus loads increased by 35%, compared to the 1980-1996 baseline.
Nutrient levels were highest between 2016 and 2020 before declining slightly. The improvement was attributed to regulatory permits on wastewater treatment plants, which also pollute waterways.
However, nitrate levels remain well above the state’s reduction goals.
Less than 6% of Illinois farmland uses cover crops
The soil in Illinois is famously fertile and much of the land is flat. The soil isn’t highly erodible like soil on a slope or a hill might be. But when fields are left bare after harvest, the soil can easily blow away in the wind or wash away in storms, depositing fertilizers and chemicals into waterways.
Cover crops, which include winter wheat, crimson clover, cereal rye, oats or radish, are planted after harvest and before winter. The crops can reduce soil erosion, break up compacted soil, provide a habitat for beneficial insects and wildlife, and prevent latent fertilizer from leaching into rivers and streams.
Since the Fall Cover for Spring Savings program began in 2019, the Illinois Department of Agriculture has received more applications than the program can fund.
This year, the program sold out in two hours.
Under current funding levels, only 200,000 acres are available, which advocates say is too small.
“At the rate conservation is being invested in right now for agriculture, it would take 200 years to hit the goals under the Nutrient Reduction Strategy. And that’s assuming … there would be new adopters,” said Eliot Clay, executive director of the statewide Association of Soil and Water Conservation District.
The Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy (NLRS) is a statewide, multi-agency effort to reduce the amount of nutrients in Illinois waterways and the Gulf of Mexico. The policy working group’s latest report, produced in 2023, found that to meet just half of its goals of reducing runoff, nearly all of Illinois’ corn and soybean farmers would need to adopt cover crops.
“It doesn’t mean the state won’t meet the goal,” a spokesperson for the NLRS team at University of Illinois Extension said in an emailed statement to Investigate Midwest. “There is quite a bit of variability of riverine nutrient loads at watershed scales for nitrogen and phosphorus.”
However, the spokesperson added that more research, data acquisition, and planning are needed at watershed scales.
Out of the state’s 26.3 million acres of farmland, an estimated 3% to 6% grew cover crops in 2022, according to USDA data.
Kristopher Reynolds, Midwest director for American Farmland Trust and a fifth-generation farmer in Nokomis, said Illinois needs to see cover crop adoption of at least 15% and more state and federal incentives are needed.
The Gulf Hypoxia Task Force, a federally funded program through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has provided additional funding to supplement the cover crop program. However, the Trump administration’s freeze of some federal grants might put those funds at risk.
Earlier this year, the Illinois Department of Agriculture was awarded a $25 million grant from the EPA to support conservation practices for the next three years.
“We don’t know the status (of the grant),” said Jerry Costello II, director of the Illinois Department of Agriculture, while speaking to the House Appropriations Committee on March 12. “Last that we’ve heard, things looked good. But that’s been a while.”
“We’ve got two and a half months left in this process in Illinois, right?” added Costello, citing the time the state has to finalize its 2026 budget, which begins in July 2025. “Two and a half months plus or minus. So surely we’ll have some guidance … we certainly hope so.”
Because of the sheer scale of the agriculture industry, government regulations requiring conservation practices can be difficult to carry out, said Clay, the executive director of the Soil and Water Conservation District.
Farmland covers 75% of the entire state of Illinois, and even if all farmers employed precision sensors to track runoff points, it would cost billions, Clay said.
There would also need to be an army of workers to track and enforce regulations.
However, “industry self-regulating usually doesn’t work, and it hasn’t worked in ag, because that’s basically what they’ve been doing for the most part,” Clay said. What’s needed, he added, is more public-private partnerships.
Stierwalt, the farmer in Champaign County, helped develop STAR, or Saving Tomorrow’s Agricultural Resources, which gives farmers a five-star score based on their conservation practices.
The state adopted the framework in 2023 to support the state’s nutrient loss reduction goals.
Stierwalt said the goal is to get companies to purchase agricultural commodities based on the rating system.
If the public and industries that rely on agricultural goods for ethanol or food products want sustainably raised crops, then the farmers will grow them, he said.
Cover crop barriers include both cost and culture
Cover crops have long-term benefits but can be expensive and require extra work. Crop yields may even decrease during the first few years.
Cover crops cost roughly $35 to $40 an acre, and farmers don’t make a direct profit from it. The crops are planted in the fall and aren’t harvested. Instead, as the plants die and decompose, they provide nutrients back into the soil for the new commodity crop. Some farmers terminate the crops with chemical herbicides.
But the $5 an acre from the Fall Cover for Spring Savings program acts as an incentive for doing the right thing, which will pay off later, said Ed Dubrick, a small pasture poultry farmer in Cissna Park who also farms vegetables with his wife.
“It’s an investment because you know you’re doing right by the environment,” Dubrick said. “You know you’re doing right by your land, and long term, you’re going to build your soil health, and that will impact your bottom line.”
There are also cultural barriers to planting cover crops. Row crop farmers often pride themselves on tidy, neat rows, and cover cropping and no-till can leave fields looking messy.
Walter Lynn, a retired certified public accountant and farmer in Springfield, said farmers sometimes only cover crop fields that are out of sight from their neighbors or the road because they’re afraid they’ll be judged.
At a recent soil health conference in Omaha, Lynn said he met a farmer who believes he can’t openly discuss his practices with his equipment dealer, saying, “There’s a vulnerability that ag doesn’t deal well with.” But at the conference, Lynn said the farmer found a welcoming atmosphere: “It’s so good to come to this space at this meeting … I feel like I’m a member of the cover crop witness protection.”
This article first appeared on Investigate Midwest and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Investigate Midwest is an independent, nonprofit newsroom. Its mission is to serve the public interest by exposing dangerous and costly practices of influential agricultural corporations and institutions through in-depth and data-driven investigative journalism. Visit online at www.investigatemidwest.org
