Cowpeas as a Warm-Season Legume Cover Crop
Walk through a summer test plot comparing two cowpea varieties—Iron and Clay and Red Rippers. Learn why cowpeas deliver strong nitrogen production, handle heat and drought, and work best in mixes with taller crops. See the difference between a long-season type bred for forage and an earlier variety that produces seed for wildlife.
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0:00 These are cowpeas. Cowpeas are probably one of the most popular warm-season legumes that we use. Tremendous growth potential, a lot of heat tolerance, very.
0:09 Good drought tolerance and an excellent producing an excellent producer of nitrogen. Now out here by themselves they don't look all that impressive, you know.
0:17 They're only up to our knees here Dale. But if you reach down in here and you grab this, I mean these things are massive and they're, you know, there are.
0:26 Five feet tall easily, they're just late over on each other. So the real benefits of these is in a mix. They're very vine either, they'll crawl right up they're.
0:36 Excellent at growing interspersed with other taller crops.
0:40 Yeah we've got two different types here that we're looking at. These are the two.
0:45 Main types that we sell. I'm standing in a variety called iron and clay and ironing Flay's are very very long season coffee. So as you move south or as you
0:56 Plant earlier you want the longest season possible. These were planted the middle of June and it's now the middle of September, absolutely no pods formed.
1:15 Make them work so these are excellent forage excellent that you can put hay up out of them if you want to but the iron employee is a very long season type.
1:25 Plant they also want to talk a little bit about the red rippers here. Red rippers are an earlier maturing cowpea. You can see that they have pods on them.
1:37 One advantage of this compared to the iron clay, this is going to produce a slightly less biomass, it's going to produce slightly less nitrogen but it.
1:50 Does produce seeds which in these seeds, unlike soybeans, do not need heat treatment in order to make them digestible. And so for a wildlife value, the red rippers may have more value than the iron in place if you're talking about upland game bird or anything else that is seeking high-protein seed. Turkeys love these, residents love these, basically any seed-eating animals loves cow feces.