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Cover crops, grown between cash crop harvesting and planting, can bring significant benefits to soil conservation (Plastina et al., 2020), nutrient management (Abdalla et al., 2019), weed control (Alonso-Ayuso et al., 2018, climate change adaptation and mitigation for agroecosystems (Delgado et al., 2021). The row crop system in the U.S. Midwest, contributing to one-third of the world's corn and soybean production (Rizzo et al., 2018), however, faces grand environmental challenges on excessive use of fertilizers (Jin et al., 2019), soil carbon loss (Thaler et al., 2021), and water quality degradation (Zhao et al., 2020). Planting cover crops has been considered an essential solution to address these environmental challenges (Seifert et al., 2018). However, the cover crop adoption percentage in the U.S. Midwest was very low (3.6% of cropland acreage in 2017) (NASS, 2019), primarily due to