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://dev-agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/practices/cover-cropping.

APA Style

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

BibTeX

@misc{agricultureandfarmingatlas-cover-cropping,
  author = {Agriculture and Farming Atlas},
  title = {Cover Cropping},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-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

Comments (0)

No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.

Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)

No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.

Switch Atlas

The Inner World

The Civil World

The Natural World