Impact Forage Collard vs. Trophy Rapeseed vs. Winter Canola: Spring Planting Results

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0:14 All right now we're going to talk about the impact, the hybrid impact for each collards trophy rapeseed and then just winter canola as well. They're similar looking plants but they've got some different uses. The hybrid collards are one of our absolute favorite grazing plants planted just about any time of.

0:32 The year, but again, as you can see from a spring planting, we've got no bolting going on. So this class of brassicas have the same reproductive trigger as what start-ups did in that they have to brutalize before they're going to produce any seed. So we missed any vernalization, so we're good to go there. Dale, I think these brassica, this this...

0:53 Looks about as good as I've ever seen a brass to look at this spring. These are really really nice, and as you look at these you may not visually be able to see a lot of difference. I think the collards have probably have a little bit more growth, but if you were to send this into a lab and have them tested, I think what we would see is the

1:12 Collards are going to have a higher degree of digestibility. The TDN on these is higher, the fiber is lower than what the rapeseed is. They're both going to have pretty decent proteins. Collards are going to be higher. These collards are a cross between the Georgia Southern Collard and another type of Brassica, and the Georgia Southern collards are very.

1:32 Heat tolerant, they of course they grow them in the south and they're very high in protein. You know, the slaves and the poor people in the south, there's a reason they talk about eating a lot of collard greens is because they're very high in protein for a non-legume type plant. And so for those reasons, it's one of our favorite grazing brassicas.

1:50 Planted it whether it's in the spring, the summer or the late summer we think it's one of the best. Now the rapeseed is no slouch, it's hanging right in there as far in terms of growth. And then we also planted some winter canola. It's today, oh this is some winter canola I had bought. We were going to run through our oil press and just crush the oil seeds out of.

2:08 So we just threw some in the plot and as you can see there's very little difference between the rapeseed and the winter canola and the reason for that is rapeseed or canola is it is a type of rapeseed so they are very very closely. So what are you seeing on the below ground parts that are deal well not a tremendous amount of difference below.

3:00 Leaves, you know, protein basically is about leaf to stem ratio in plants and you can see that the colors just have much bigger leaves. Another big difference as far as grazing value is the rapeseed tends to elevate its stems, it's growing points up above the ground. The collards, all these leaf branches are coming essentially.

3:30 From right here at the crown. So after grazing past, recover so much better than what the rapeseed does. A little higher grazing value because the bigger leaves, better regrowth. And another thing we've seen, like you said, it's just a little bit better. Everything rapeseed does the tolerance.

3:56 Seem to do just a little bit better. You know there's 70, 80 cents difference per pound between the two, but when you're only putting two or three pounds an eighth or a couple bucks an acre, it's not much if you can get better grazing utilization and especially better regrow. Yeah, but if I was doing a cover crop and I wasn't grazing it, boom.

4:16 This is it's hard to go wrong with just plain old rapeseed. It's inexpensive and it's really doing a good job in the soil. The other thing that was really surprising when we first started using these collards is we knew that they had heat tolerance from the Georgia Southern Collard, but they've got just as good a cold tolerance as this rapeseed does. Yeah, so it's really a very versatile plant and probably one of our most popular brassicas that we use.