Faba Beans as a Cover Crop: What We Learned from Summer 2016
Walk through a faba bean test plot and see why this cool-season legume outperforms other beans in wet soils. Learn about nitrogen fixation, pollinator attraction, and the seed size challenge that's keeping faba beans from wider adoption in cover crop rotations.
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0:00 This is fava beans. Fava beans are the only true bean that likes cool wet soils. Most other beans need warm soils and don't take too waterlogged.
0:10 Conditions very well. These are the nicest fava beans we've ever been able to grow. Their cool season plants so they really could have been planted much.
0:19 Sooner than what they are in this plot and they've weathered the summer really quite well.
0:22 Dale, you wanna show the pods there? Yeah, a very large seeded crop of.
0:28 Of course they are used as human food. They really big seed and a lot of protein. Then both the seed and the plants very good nitrogen fixer, especially when.
0:42 It grows this well and as you can see from just the clusters of flowers that are still on this plant even while there's pods great pollinated value if.
0:55 You can see there's even on a cool wet day like this there's a lot of beneficial insects flying around there's a beneficial wasp right there a lot of a
1:10 Lot of beneficial insects are highly attracted to this. Now this I pulled up just one plant here. Look at the amount of biomass from this one plant and just.
1:29 This plant, yeah, there he is. We've got good nodulation on this plant. So if you can get the good nodulation, it's an excellent nitrogen producer.
1:39 The biggest downfall to fava beans right now is the seed size — they're so large. They don't mix well with other seeds and it's hard to get them to flow through.
1:47 Your drill especially when they're mixed with smaller seeds. We're currently working with several different breeders trying to breed a small seeded fava bean.
1:56 Variety specifically for cover crops because I think it could be a tremendous player in the cover crop game, especially being an early planted bean. We don't have access to that right now, so we're hoping that we get that through the breeders here before too long. Under the right conditions, this is a tremendous producer, as you can see from this plant. Pretty tasty.