Cowpeas Red Ripper and Mung Beans: Early Maturing Summer Legumes

0:00 Another popular cowpea variety is red rippers and as you can see these red rippers are already producing seed in there. They're planted fairly late and they are very early maturity compared to.

0:30 The iron and clays, that means advantages and disadvantages. One is that we can produce the seed more locally. We don't have the freight cost on them like we do the iron and clay which are grown in the deep south. The red rippers also.

0:46 Seem to get out of the ground and grow faster initially than the iron in clays, a little more aggressive out of the gate. So if you have a short growing window, the red rippers will usually outperform.

1:03 The iron in clays it's when you have a longer window where the iron and clay is really tend to dominate another place where red rip or cow peas have a real advantages in wildlife food plots that are designed for upland game birds all.

1:23 These pods will open up, shatter seed on the ground. It's about 24 percent protein seed, very high protein seed that game birds really like. In fact a lot of animals really like these seeds, high protein unlike a lot of other legumes.

1:41 They don't have any digestion inhibiting compounds, no lectins or trypsin inhibitors like, for example, soybeans have or a lot of your other beans. These don't need cooked to become digestible. So this is used as a human food.

2:03 Also used for wildlife food and it's a great pasture crop as well. Now another summer annual legume that's very similar to the cow peas is mung beans, and mung beans, they look fairly similar to soybeans but they're closer.

2:36 lot of that is because the seeds if you look at the seeds on these things and have a very high seed count per pound just takes 20 pounds as a full seeding rate if you look at the size of these seeds compared to the cow peas there's

2:56 Quite a little difference in seed size between these red copy seeds and the mung beans and several several times the number of seeds per pound and the mung beans as what we have in the cow peas so and they're about the same cost per.

3:21 Pound and so you per acre cost you're quite a bit less on the mung beans. They do mature early so their growth period is not as great. One other advantage mung beans have is that cow peas, the leaves have almost a bit of a

3:44 Strange odor that grazing animals a lot of times don't—they're unfamiliar with it, it smells funny, they don't want to eat it. The mung beans smell just fine, and so these are more palatable, especially initially. The grazing animals, I kind of like to put some mung beans in with my cow peas when I'm looking for pasture. I figure this is like the gateway legume, the one they try first, get some hooked on the harder stuff, the cow peas. So there are some advantages to all of these different summer annual legumes, and that's why we like diversity. But some of each in and spread your risk around.