The new Conservation Crop Rotation Tool for Small Farms and Gardens is designed to help famers, gardeners, and conservationists learn about and plan crop rotations. Access the tool from our Soil Health webpage under the Crop Rotation section.
Intentionally planned crop rotations can lead to advantages in relation to disease, weeds, insects, crop nutrition, soil structure, and crop management. Many of these crop rotations are documented in the wonderful resource, SARE Crop Rotation on Organic Farms, A Planning Manual. The new tool automates the book’s crop sequence table so that a user can select a specific vegetable, flower, or cover crop and see both advantages and disadvantages of planting it before or after other crops.
The tool has a crop list with names and families of commonly grown vegetables, flowers, and cover crops. The user can build crop rotations and any crop sequence that may cause disease gets flagged.
This tool was developed by Kevin Allison (Marion County SWCD) and Elli Blaine (Indiana Small Farm Conservation) with support from our conservation partners and grower input.
This work is supported through the USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service, Marion County Soil and Water Conservation District, Indiana Small Farms Conservation, North Central SARE, and Clean Water Indiana. The USDA-NRCS is an equal opportunity provider, employer, and lender. This material is based upon work that is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under agreement number 2024-38640-42989 through the North Central Region SARE program under project number ENC24-233. USDA is an equal opportunity employer and service provider. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
