Chickling Vetch AC Greenfix: Nitrogen Fixation and Early Spring Grazing

0:00 [Music]

0:14 All right now we're going to talk about chickling vetch. This is an EC green vetch, chickling vetch, and chickling vetch is a very interesting plant. It's not at all like the other vetches we've looked.

0:25 It's not like the wooly pod midge. It's not like the common batch. It looks a little bit more like a grass plant and a little bit like a pea plant, and in fact in some areas it's called grass line and it's actually a Lazarus and the

0:38 Laparis family, it's got some very unique characteristics. In fact, this is one of the very few crops that anybody uses that was developed and designed with one goal in mind, and that was as a green manure cover crop.

0:53 Because when you produce this seed, the seed itself has neurotoxins in so you can't beat the seed, the livestock, humans can't consume the seed, but the plant itself is safe to graze. You can pay it and do things like that, so it's only.

1:07 Viable commercial purposes for this above-ground biomass and because it's got characteristics of batch and some appease and some of grass, it really fits some very unique niches. It is one of the best nitrogen-fixing spring.

1:22 Planted legumes the organic guys love this stuff because you can get a lot of nitrogen production in a fairly short window of time till you dug up one of the plants there talk a little bit about what you're seeing this this is probably

1:34 Of all the spring plants the kids next to the fava beans, this is nice, impressive nodulation seen, and not just individuals but these big clumps.

1:46 Yeah, they're huge, they're almost and the bigger ones got knocked out.

2:10 Actually not a veg family, it's a I keep said with iris which is a sweet pea family. It has the flat stems like the sweet peas do and it's like a though it locks, it makes a really nice man. This is just excellent nitrogen.

2:35 Fixer also palatable livestock they measured very good gains on it. It's starting to get some traction down farther south as something the plant in early spring and the Bermuda grass to start that grazing season a little early.

2:52 And gets nitrogen to help the Bernina vessel and I think this would roll down pretty well. The roller crimper it's got a little bit of that hollow type stem and very succulent eyes plant, probably one of the bigger drawbacks.

3:06 Is this the seed size is relatively large. We've ever seen this seed, it looks like a pile of handful of gravel, different shapes, different sizes, different colors, very strange-looking seed, but again one of the top legumes that are requested by organic producers for spring planting.