While cover crops are becoming more popular among no-tillers, you’d better take a closer look at how the practice may impact crop insurance payments. Unfortunately, cover crops could inadvertently terminate your crop insurance coverage.

Few growers have thought about legally transferring saved Roundup Ready soybeans out of their grain bins to dump in the planter or drill when seeding no-till fields. But with the patents expiring on the older Roundup Ready soybean technology in 4 years, it might be a possibility.

My son, Mike, and I recently spent 6 days looking at no-till in the Palouse, a 3,000-square-mile area located in the southeastern corner of Washington, north central Idaho and northeast Oregon. While I've visited this area several times where no-tillers grow crops on slopes as steep as 60%, I’d never been there during harvest of wheat, barley, peas, lentils and garbanzo beans.

Over the past 38 years, we've produced a handful of No-Till Farmer articles on no-tilling corn and other crops into a living cover, such as alfalfa sod, cereal rye or wheat. But it’s a tricky maneuver and one that has not caught on among many no-tillers.