Soil Health

The Wisconsin Cover Crop Citizen Science Project

Beginning in 2020, we launched an effort to build a statewide network of farmers sharing data and samples from their cover crops systems and contributing to the state’s growing knowledge base about cover crops.

Wisconsin farmers are sharing how they use cover crops and helping to improve cover cropping for farmers all around the state.

A state wide network of collaborating citizen science farmers fill out a survey about their cover crop practices, take photos of cover crop growth, and provide biomass samples. We pay participants an honorarium, and share personalized cover crop nutrient analysis data in addition to total biomass production and forage quality information. We also incorporate farmer feedback in research and outreach programming, including the Wisconsin Cover Crop Conference.

Explore farmers’ results from the 2023-4 season in this interactive map.

For more data visualization tools, check out our interactive data dashboard.

Project collaborator and UW agronomist Gregg Sanford discusses his work on comparative cropping systems and why farmers participating in citizen science is key to improving agriculture.

Original Research Article: Building cover crop expertise with citizen science in the upper Midwest: supporting farmer innovation in a time of change” Front. Sustain. Food Syst., 19 May 2023, M. Ingram, Participatory Action Research Scientist, Michael Fields Agricultural Institute.

Special thanks to participating farmers!

The Wisconsin Cover Crop Citizen Science Project is a partnership with The Nature Conservancy. Our collaborators also include UW-Madison’s NPM Program and Agronomy Department, as well as the USDA Dairy Forage Research Center and the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems.

Questions? Contact:

Mrill Ingram, Michael Fields Agricultural Institute

mingram@wisc.edu; (608) 695-6405

Dan Smith, UW-Madison Nutrient and Pest Management Program

dhsmith@wisc.edu ; 608-219-5170

Ricardo Costa Silva, The Nature Conservancy

 r.costasilva@tnc.org ; 573 639-8971.