Agricultural Land Management Practices in the Conterminous United States from 1980–2023

Abstract. Agricultural land management practices affect environmental variables including greenhouse gas emissions, carbon and nitrogen cycles, soil profiles, water quality, and air pollution. To better understand agricultural land management practices, we compiled a land management history for the conterminous United States (CONUS) from 1980–2023. We used the National Resources Inventory as the basis for our sample-based approach to impute planting and harvest dates, synthetic N fertilizer and manure N and C application rates and timing, tillage systems and intensity, and cover crop adoption. We aggregated the imputations to a 0.25-degree grid and compiled a comprehensive dataset detailing the management practices used on agricultural lands across CONUS. From 1980–2023, we found trends towards later planting dates for cotton and spring grains and trends towards earlier planting dates for soybeans. Synthetic N fertilizer rates increased steadily from 1980–2000 and then stabilized from 2000–2023, while manure N amendments were low between 1980 and 2000 and then increased rapidly from 2000–2023. Generally, there were increases in no-till and reduced-till systems across CONUS, with more notable increases in central and eastern regions. Cover crop adoption increased across CONUS from 1980–2023, with the highest level of adoption occurring in the Northeast. The results from this product align with previously published histories, although our work provides a more comprehensive representation of cropland management practices than previous works. Our dataset is available on Dryad under public domain license (Hoskovec et al., 2025) and can be used to inform studies of agricultural lands that evaluate processes such as greenhouse gas emissions, environmental impacts, and food production.