At the 2026 National No-Tillage Conference in St. Louis, Mo., Rob Myers shared some strategies to maximize cover crops’ use and profitability. Myers is the director of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture at the Univ. of Missouri, and he never wants a farmer to believe that cover crops won’t work for their area. 

And one-way growers can make cover crops work for them is to reduce the expense of cover crops and even turn a profit on them through grazing livestock. 

Myers shared data from the 2022-23 National Cover Crop Survey conducted by the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) and Conservation Technology Information Center (CTIC) that showed most growers (30%) grazing cover crops profited somewhere between $25-$49 per acre.

Another 23% reported profits of $50-$75 per acre, while a quarter saw profits up to $24 per acre. Around 12% reported breaking even, while 9% said they lost money on grazing cover crops.

“That’s probably a situation where the cost of fencing and/or water quality initially was pulling down the net profit,” Myers says.

Thanks to new technologies like virtual fencing, some of those initial costs can be alleviated to help growers see a profit even faster.

In addition to the profit potential, Myers notes that our natural systems evolved with herbivores and their manure, urine and saliva, were important parts of how the soil microbiome evolved. Adding them into the system is a faster way to stimulate soil biology and reap the benefits of cover crops even sooner.

“Those microbes were used to having grazing animals,” he says. “I think that’s why when we add grazing animals to the system, we see such a strong response.”

To learn more about how to make cover crops work for your operation, and what research is being done in the field, read Laura Barrera’s article “Researchers Breeding Covers for Targeted Benefits, Specific Environments” in the June 2026 issue of No-Till Farmer.