Illinois Governor Moves to Slash Cover Crop Funds Despite Rising Demand

By Jennifer Bamberg

When Steve Stierwalt studied agriculture at the University of Illinois in the 1970s, soil health wasn’t commonly taught or discussed. Faculty often told their young farming students to put all their faith in commercial fertilizers. 

But over his 40 years as a corn and soybean farmer in Champaign County, Stierwalt said soil erosion, which can cause fertilizer and manure runoff to end up in nearby rivers and streams, has become an increasingly serious problem. 

“When we plowed, we plowed pretty much everything,” except for a row near the fence line, Stierwalt said. “The grass near the fence row kept getting taller, it seemed to me. I came to understand that it wasn’t the fence row getting taller, it was the soil in the fields that was getting shorter.”

In the early 2010s, Stierwalt started experimenting with cover crops, which can help hold soil in place and reduce runoff pollution.

“This valuable resource that we take for granted, we were letting it get away,” Stierwalt said. “We have some of the best soil in the world here, and we have to protect it.” 

Six years ago, Illinois became the second state in the nation to offer subsidies to farmers for planting cover crops in the fall, an effort to reverse its status as one of the worst states for agriculture runoff. Demand for the Fall Cover for Spring Savings program  which offers a $5 per acre discount on the following year’s crop insurance premiums  has outpaced state funding every year since. 

However, despite the program’s popularity and calls from environmentalists and farmers for its funding to increase, Gov. JB Pritzker has proposed a 31% funding cut.

Pritzker, a Democrat, recently proposed an overall $2 billion increase to next year’s state budget. But he also recommended cuts to several programs, including reducing the cover crop insurance credit budget from $960,000 to $660,000. 

Pritzker’s office did not respond to a request for comment but the governor referenced program cuts in a recent address.

“I have made difficult decisions  including to programs I have championed, which is hard for me,” Pritzker said during his State of the State and budget address in February. 

Two state lawmakers introduced bills this legislative session to increase the program’s annual funding to $6.1 million. They say it’s crucial to support the practice, which will benefit communities in Illinois and beyond.

The bills did not clear a recent committee deadline. However, lawmakers can still negotiate funding for the program as they continue to work to pass a budget by the end of May.

Illinois is one of the leading states for farm fertilizer runoff and one of the top contributors to the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone, a barren area of around 4,500 square miles of coastal waters deadly to fish, shrimp and other marine life. It costs the region’s fishing and tourism industry millions annually.  

Runoff from Illinois farms has only worsened, according to a 2023 state study. Between 2017 and 2021, average nitrate-nitrogen loads increased by 4.8%, and total phosphorus loads increased by 35%, compared to the 1980-1996 baseline. 

Nutrient levels were highest between 2016 and 2020 before declining slightly. The improvement was attributed to regulatory permits on wastewater treatment plants, which also pollute waterways. 

However, nitrate levels remain well above the state’s reduction goals. 

Less than 6% of Illinois farmland uses cover crops

The soil in Illinois is famously fertile and much of the land is flat. The soil isn’t highly erodible like soil on a slope or a hill might be. But when fields are left bare after harvest, the soil can easily blow away in the wind or wash away in storms, depositing fertilizers and chemicals into waterways. 

Cover crops, which include winter wheat, crimson clover, cereal rye, oats or radish, are planted after harvest and before winter. The crops can reduce soil erosion, break up compacted soil, provide a habitat for beneficial insects and wildlife, and prevent latent fertilizer from leaching into rivers and streams. 

Since the Fall Cover for Spring Savings program began in 2019, the Illinois Department of Agriculture has received more applications than the program can fund. 

This year, the program sold out in two hours.

Under current funding levels, only 200,000 acres are available, which advocates say is too small.

“At the rate conservation is being invested in right now for agriculture, it would take 200 years to hit the goals under the Nutrient Reduction Strategy. And that’s assuming  there would be new adopters,” said Eliot Clay, executive director of the statewide Association of Soil and Water Conservation District. 

The Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy (NLRS) is a statewide, multi-agency effort to reduce the amount of nutrients in Illinois waterways and the Gulf of Mexico. The policy working group’s latest report, produced in 2023, found that to meet just half of its goals of reducing runoff, nearly all of Illinois’ corn and soybean farmers would need to adopt cover crops. 

“It doesn’t mean the state won’t meet the goal,” a spokesperson for the NLRS team at University of Illinois Extension said in an emailed statement to Investigate Midwest. “There is quite a bit of variability of riverine nutrient loads at watershed scales for nitrogen and phosphorus.” 

However, the spokesperson added that more research, data acquisition, and planning are needed at watershed scales. 

Out of the state’s 26.3 million acres of farmland, an estimated 3% to 6% grew cover crops in 2022, according to USDA data.

Kristopher Reynolds, Midwest director for American Farmland Trust and a fifth-generation farmer in Nokomis, said Illinois needs to see cover crop adoption of at least 15% and more state and federal incentives are needed. 

The Gulf Hypoxia Task Force, a federally funded program through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has provided additional funding to supplement the cover crop program. However, the Trump administration’s freeze of some federal grants might put those funds at risk. 

Earlier this year, the Illinois Department of Agriculture was awarded a $25 million grant from the EPA to support conservation practices for the next three years. 

“We don’t know the status (of the grant),” said Jerry Costello II, director of the Illinois Department of Agriculture, while speaking to the House Appropriations Committee on March 12. “Last that we’ve heard, things looked good. But that’s been a while.”

“We’ve got two and a half months left in this process in Illinois, right?” added Costello, citing the time the state has to finalize its 2026 budget, which begins in July 2025. “Two and a half months plus or minus. So surely we’ll have some guidance  we certainly hope so.”

Because of the sheer scale of the agriculture industry, government regulations requiring conservation practices can be difficult to carry out, said Clay, the executive director of the Soil and Water Conservation District.