Green Lands Blue Waters Seeks Research and Review Articles in Sustainable Food Systems
What is Continuous Living Cover?
Continuous Living Cover (CLC) refers to agricultural systems in which there are living plants and roots in the ground throughout the entire year. This can take many forms, from winter cover crops sown between summer annuals to agroforestry practices and perennial grain production. The core of the CLC approach is field- and farm-level implementation on a broad scale that translates to landscape-scale transformation: moving away from months of bare soil and wasted solar energy and water to continuous soil coverage and longer periods of growth and crop production.
CLC addresses a suite of environmental challenges, notably groundwater quality, water use efficiency, hypoxia, and soil health, and may result in socioeconomic benefits such as improved financial stability for producers, long-term farm sustainability and community resiliency. There are a number of potential strategies to realize CLC, but in order to be achievable they must also be economically viable for producers. Ultimately, as CLC strategies are more fully woven into field, farm, and landscape, CLC can offset the undesirable impacts of input-intensive annual monocultures. These CLC strategies demonstrate how agriculture can be a solution to sustaining our natural resource base while providing new opportunities for farmers; developing more diverse, responsible, and nutritious supply chains; and improving the vitality of rural communities.
The concept of CLC provides a way to frame these efforts and creates a pathway to meet the broad goals of regenerative agriculture. This research topic aims to characterize CLC and contextualize it with a set of cross-disciplinary articles, presenting cutting-edge research and aggregating key findings from the existing body of work. It will inform a broader audience of the potential benefits of these strategies, make them more accessible, and strengthen the concept of CLC in the fields of agriculture and agroecology.