An Online Cover Crop Decision Tool to Quickly Choose the Right Cover Crop

Growers interested in using cover crops often miss opportunities to use them because of small impediments to getting the right information. Two important limitations were identified: selection appropriate crops based on field constraints at the time of decision-making, and access to seed at competitive delivered cost. To overcome these limitations, we developed on online decision tool. The tool helps growers quickly choose cover crops based on when they can plant  and their management goal. The results can then be narrowed easily by specific constraints due to rotation, equipment requirements and other factors. Once the selection is made, the tool provides concise and precise planting and management instructions tailored to the location. The tool is a simple search function on a PHP web page, tied to an easily-edited SQL database on the server and a collection of HTML and PDF files with the instructions. An intentional limitation is the inclusion only of cover crops that are currently available at a reasonable cost (<$40 per acre delivered for non-legumes in 2008). The precision that is essential to making the tool useful requires limiting it's application to a relatively small region.  However, it would be easy to adapt to regions where the requisite data are available about the cover crops. The tool is available at cover crop.net or tinyurl.com/NYccTool. Since its launch in April 2008, it has delivered roughly 40 search results per day.