Forage Soybeans as a Cover Crop: Group 5 vs. Group 7 Varieties

0:00 These are forage soybeans. When we use soybeans as a cover crop we'd like to have a long season soybean so that they don't make seed as early as what your normal beans would, because once they make seed they're no longer growing.

0:16 Vegetatively nearly as well. This first type that we're going to show you here, these are a group 5 forage soybean, and you can see that they get a lot more biomass than the non forage types, but being a group 5.

0:30 They have foot on. I'm actually surprised how many pods these two put on for being planted third week in June here in Nebraska, and they've got quite a few pods but they grew very, very fast. These things were this tall a month ago.

0:45 And since then they've just really been kind of putting on pods as compared to the group seven soybeans over here. We're dealing with that the group seven soybeans are still growing vegetatively, they're still blooming, they're just now.

0:58 Kind of starting to put on some very small pods so I would expect these to continue to grow both in heights and continue to put more root exudates into the ground than what the one that's putting more pods on the group seven.

1:13 Right now if this is not a true forage type we're working on getting some group seven forage soybeans, but you've got different options because the forage soybeans are more of a forage producer. They don't produce as much seed, so seed.

1:29 Costs typically is a little higher yeah.

1:31 One other advantage of the longer maturity forage soybeans is a lot of people don't realize that nodulation nitrogen production ceases once pod formation begins the plant feeds as.

2:03 More nitrogen production than you went with a grain type choice, and because you're leaving the biomass and the seeds out on the field for joy, being are actually capable of pretty impressive nitrogen fixation. We don't think about.

2:18 Soybeans as being great nitrogen fixers. That's only because we haul most of the nitrogen off in the beans themselves. There's actually every bushel of soybeans contains four pounds of nitrogen. Now 60 bushel beans, that's 240.

2:35 Pounds of nitrogen in addition to what's in the roots and stems. Yeah, and these either one of these products would be excellent to be mixed with some of the shorter statured sorghums like you put this with that briquetting dwarf sorghum.

2:48 These things will grow as tall as whatever is around it and they'll tend to get kind of binding so they could easily grow up 6, 7, 8 feet tall with a sorghum product or even the corn and maker. They'll really add a lot of protein to it to a silage or a grazing mix. We mix with the warm season grasses. Yes, adding these to a warm season grass can add a small amount of biomass over a single species alone but add a lot of protein and a lot of animal performance value.