Golden Flax: Why This Overlooked Cover Crop Punches Above Its Weight

0:06 All right. So, this is one of our flax test plots. So, this specific strip is golden flax. We also plant and often carry brown flax here at Green Cover. They perform about the same, but flax is a really awesome cover crop.

0:19 This plot's about 2 months old. So, you can see from the shrimp, we're flowering really nicely. If you come out in the morning in your flax, it's going to be

0:25 These beautiful kind of blue flowers. They do close up during the heat of the day and kind of go away, but then they come back out in the mornings.

0:33 So flax is a cover crop I've really come to use pretty much year round. It's a cool season broadleaf, so these plots planted in early April. It has the frost tolerance. It can shake off some late season frosts or mild freezes before it.

0:47 Winter kills, but I've seen it perform well all summer long. We use it in corn interseeding, we use it in summer soil builder mixes. I'll put a dash of it in a grazing mix because I really like how it performs. It's kind of an unassuming plant. We're about knee high. It's not an overly deep root system necessarily, but it's a different plant family. It's a low cost seed.

1:11 Normally just around a dollar a pound, and a pound or two in a mix, so we're not adding a lot of cost there.

1:16 One of the best things about flax, other than maybe the pollinator benefit of the flowers, is its ability to associate with mycorrhizal fungi. So it makes really good associations when we've pulled tests before. It's often really high in a lot of the nutrients we're looking for.

1:32 Trying to make those bio available in the plants. And so I just think for that reason it's a plant that can play in a lot of scenarios.

1:40 Yeah. So Christine Jones is probably one of the top soil biologists in the world. She's been here to our farm a couple of times and I always remember what she says about flax and she loves flax too. And she says, 'Flax is one of those plants and she says it punches

1:54 Above its weight. And what that means, like Nathan said, it's kind of an unassuming plant. It's not real big. In fact, if you look at it, it's kind of a skinny little plant, but it almost never gets crowded out in a mix. It kind of gives a little elbow here and there and finds its way, but it's never going to take over either. It's not going to get a whole lot bigger than this in a lot of mixes, so it's not going to.

2:17 Take over a mix, but it also doesn't get crowded out. Highly microisal like Nathan said, it helps tie a lot of the other plants together because of its ability to foster those microisa networks. And flax. Flax is something that is extremely unpalatable. You are not going to get animals to eat this. It's very high in carbon. It's very lignous. It's very fibrous. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't consider.

3:11 Last thing I want to say about flax. Flax is one of those things when you go to the supermarket, you can buy the seed as a superfood. It's a superfood because it's really high in the beneficial omegas. It's just packed with all of these different nutrients and flavonoids. So it's extremely healthy to eat the seed. And the reason that it's able to do that is because it's a great ability to pull all these.

3:37 Nutrients out of the soil. Anything that's going to end up in that seed is coming out of the soil. And so because it has the ability to just pack that seed full of beneficial nutrients and omega oils, it's very high in oil. It's 40% oil. It has a tremendous association with all of the soil biology in order to be able to do that. So all of these superfoods often make really good cover crops because the superfood.

4:05 Always starts with the root system and with the soil. The added benefit is flax just grows really easy. You know, when we come out and we plant these test plot strips, flax is almost always one of the first one that you can row it. It just hits that soil. It gets off, it gets going, it's up, it makes you feel like you've really done something well and you're going to have a successful.

4:27 There's a lot of uses for this cover crop. You're almost never going to plant it by itself. This is a great thing in mixes, probably not in monocultures, but yeah, you should consider flax pretty much in every cover crop situation you have going on.

4:39 Not a deep tap root, but really fibrous root. You can just see all of these little white roots. So we're doing a lot of soil remediation and building probably in that top, you know, 4 in of soil. There's other things that can go deep and that's why it's a great companion in a mix.