Another day, another study showing the economic benefits of soil health.

Sometimes a headline says it all—

“Farm Study: Regenerative Ag Practices Increase Profits, Improve Soil Health”

That’s the intro to a story that greeted me when I opened up the latest issue of the “No-till Farmer” newsletter.    It seems that for the last three years a group called the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association has been working with the non-profit Soil Health Academy to do a side-by-side-by-side comparison of conventionally farmed corn/soybean/corn rotation cropping system against both a no-till corn/soybean/corn rotation cropping system and a no-till with cover crops with a corn/soybean/wheat rotation cropping system to look at profits per acre and determine which system most benefited the bottom line of the participating producers.   I say participating producers because the study differed from traditional academic “test plot” research by featuring working farms of significant acreage that were in close proximity to one another.

In the three-year-period of this project, the study showed that the no-till with cover crops and a corn/soybean/wheat rotation system yielded more than a $125 per-acre increase in profits over the no-till/no-cover-crops operation and more than a $130 per-acre increase in profits over the conventional operation featuring tillage.  This was done purely with crop production and no additional income from grazing animals or other non-traditional sources like direct-to-consumer marketing efforts.  The combination of lowering overall input costs by utilizing cover crops to make nutrients available to the cash crops and by added cropping diversity appears to have provided additional improvement in soil function resulting in better overall results in terms of costs, yields and profit-per-acre.

As one study participant put it “While yield has been marketed for decades as ‘The be-all end-all,’ profit per acre is the ultimate barometer of success. Money in the bank account is better than ‘bushel bragging rights.’”

If you want more information on the results of this study you can find a full report here:

https://www.no-tillfarmer.com/articles/10526-farm-study-regenerative-ag-practices-increase-profits-improve-soil-health