Practices

Cover Cropping

Also Known As Green manuring (where the cover is ploughed in)

Citation Formats

General Reference

Agriculture and Farming Atlas. "Cover Cropping." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/practices/cover-cropping.

APA Style

Agriculture and Farming Atlas. (n.d.). Cover Cropping. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/practices/cover-cropping

BibTeX

@misc{agricultureandfarmingatlas-cover-cropping,
  author = {Agriculture and Farming Atlas},
  title = {Cover Cropping},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/practices/cover-cropping},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Sowing a crop not to harvest it but to keep the soil covered and working between cash crops: clover or vetch to fix nitrogen, rye to hold the surface through winter, radish to break compaction. The practice pairs naturally with no-till and rotation as the third leg of soil-conserving grain farming.

Facts

Practice Class

Soil conservation and fertility 1

Origin

Green manuring attested in ancient China and Rome; revived at scale with 20th and 21st century conservation agriculture 1

Cross-Tradition Connections

In Discipline

Agroecology

Source Cover Crop (Wikipedia)

Sources

1. Cover Crop (Wikipedia)

Wikimedia FoundationView the Source

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