Over Winter Test Plots: April 15 Update on Cereals, Legumes & Mixes

0:04 Hello everybody. Keith Burns and Davis Bailey here with Green Cover Seed. We're going to give you a quick plot tour. We call these our overwintering plots Davis. Tell us a little bit about how the plots were set up and when they were planted.

0:17 These plots were planted September 30th. We wanted to focus mostly on the cereals and the legumes that we use in over wintering mixes. We tried a few brassicas mixed in with some clovers and we didn't see exceptional stand there, just a little bit too late. But again we have the overwintering cereals and grasses, the legumes.

0:40 Here right now we're in the clovers and we've got four clovers here. We've got fixation blanca clover, Kentucky Pride crimson clover. Right here I'm standing in the yellow clover. And then we've got the big red clover, a newer variety for us.

0:58 So several things that we're really going to stress and point out as we work our way through this. Number one, this was probably planted later than what we would want if we wanted to try to establish clovers. And you'll see that the clovers aren't the greatest thing that we have out here, but it's a realistic time for when we would plant a lot of cover crops in a typical fall.

1:22 The second thing is we got to record cold levels this winter. I know my thermometer said 34 below zero one morning, so we were extraordinarily cold. But you cannot tell that from these plots. We had some of the best overwintering that we've ever had. And that goes to show you how powerful of an insulator snow is. Because when we got that cold, we had probably 12 to 16 inches of snow really laid nicely across all these plots and we had extraordinary overwintering ability.

1:58 In fact, this crimson clover that I'm standing in, this happens to be Kentucky Pride crimson clover. This is probably one of the nicest stands of crimson clover we've ever had over winter. And I would say I've probably only seen crimson over winter here maybe three out of the last 12 years, and that tells you how good that snow was at insulating things because we would not see this even in a relatively mild winter with no snow cover.

2:25 So the crimson clover is obviously the fastest growing clover. It's the biggest so far, it's got a really good stand. Kentucky Pride is an improved version of a Dixie type crimson clover. So I'm excited to see how this looks and how this works. The Bellonsa clover next to it here, and this is not surprising Bellonsa is a kind.

2:45 Of a slow starter. It's going to look slow but once it starts growing and kicking in, it's really going to grow fast and it will overtake this crimson clover. And the amount of biomass produced this spring we will be out here to give periodic updates and show how this is growing and which one is kind of catching up.

3:05 The yellow blossom, too late for it to really establish, so I'm not surprised that there's not a lot out there. There's some, it's sporadic, it's not the greatest stand. But again, for yellow blossom, we would want to probably establish that at the end of August would really be more ideal on that.

3:23 And then the red clover, a perennial type clover, so it's going to come on, it'll probably fill in. But again, a poor stand, again just far, far too late to really get it established, right.

3:35 So you know, sometimes when we do these plots, we want to demonstrate things that we don't recommend. And this is why we wouldn't recommend putting these clovers in this late because you're just not going to have the best chance of success on those, right.

3:49 Yeah, when we came out here beginning of March, it's April 15th right now, so about a month ago, I was surprised to see that the only clover that was visible at that time was the crimson clover. As you think about it, it's not quite as surprising because if it is the fastest growing clover, which it is, since we had that nice blanket of snow, it over wintered exceptionally well, and so it makes sense that we see it with the best stand right here right now.

4:17 Like you said, I think we expect that fixation to kick in a little bit later. We'll come back in a couple weeks and give you an update on this.

4:24 Okay, these next set of plots are winter peas, which again are not the most reliable overwintering legume for us. But again, with the snow that we had, these are some of the nicest winter peas that we've had as well. Davis, tell us what we got planted here.

4:39 We have three strips here. Two of the strips, these first two are Austrian winter peas. The first strip is planted at one and a half inches deep. The second strip where Keith is standing is two and a half inches deep. And then where I'm standing here are our new Wyo winter peas. And what depth were those planted at?

4:57 They were planted at two and a half inches and a half. Also, one of the reasons that we wanted to plant them deeper is that typically to get a winter pea to over winter, the deeper you plant it the better it is because you got to keep the growing

5:09 Point under the ground to keep it from freezing off. And so we would have expected in a normal winter for these deeper planted ones to look better than the shallow planted ones at an inch and a half. But they look fine, but again that's because we had the snow cover. And so there's maybe some subtle differences. I think the wild winters maybe look a little bit nicer, a little more even stand.

5:36 What the wild winters are is a fairly new variety developed by the University of Wyoming, thus the name. It is a selection out of Austrian winter peas, so they're not going to look a lot different, but they've been selected to overwinter in cold dry winters. They were developed there in Laramie, Wyoming on the high plains. And so we think that it's going to be a better pea. Our growers of these really like them. They like them better than the regular Austrians. They have overwintered consistently now for three years up in northern Nebraska where one of our growers are at. And so we're pretty excited about them. We think that it's going to be our winter pea of the future.

6:15 If you look Davis, you can see there's a number of these plants that have some burning on the down at the base. I'm guessing that some of the early growth that was out here probably got cold enough to where it froze off part of that. But again a wind and peak and freeze everything above the ground off. As long as the growing point under the ground has not frozen, it will keep growing new shoots out. And so I'm guessing that what we're seeing is some of the early growth that kind of got singed a little bit with some cold weather, but they've grown out of it just fine. And I think they're going to continue to grow. And we've actually behind these trees over here we have a few acres that we may let grow out and see if we can harvest some of these wild winter peas as well.

6:59 Yeah, even where you see the frost damage, you see new shoots like Keith is talking about. But you also see out of that same chute actually significant growth even though we've got the brown leaves below it. So right next to the winter peas we have winter lentils. These are Morton winter lentils. It's actually the only variety that I'm aware of that is a true winter lentil. Lentils are in the same family as peas and vetch. They are kind of the less aggressive cousin, I guess I would say, to vetch. We've actually seen pretty good consistent winter hardiness out of these winter lentils. And again this year is no exception, pretty good stand. Lentils are never going to take over a plot.

7:42 They don't vine like a vetch does. They kind of stay a little bit more contained within themselves, but they're a really good companion crop. You're not going to get great weed control from lentils by themselves, so we would never, unless you're trying to grow them for seed, we would never want to see you put lentils in alone. But they're a nice companion crop to other mixes that you would do.

8:02 So we sell more spring lentils and winter lentils, but these winter lentils did really well this year. Yeah, certainly something to put in a mix because you can see it establishes beautifully, but if you're wanting to plant a cover crop primarily for weed suppression, I certainly wouldn't count on lentils alone.

8:21 All right, Davis, now we come to hairy vetch, cherry vatch. We touted as the most reliable overwintering of all legumes, and again we had good snow cover so a lot of it did over winter. We've got some interesting things to look at here in the hairy vetches, so go ahead and tell us what we've got planted here.

8:41 Right next to the cereals there, we've got woolly pod vetch. Oftentimes we would consider that here in Nebraska more of a spring vetch, really good drought resistance, and we use it in a lot of places in the country, a lot of different times of the year. I think next to it is Spanish vetch, and I'll let you talk more about that one. But then as we get into the true hairy vetches here, we have a Aumerit. I'm standing in the Montana hairy vetch. Then next to me is the winter king, and next to that, in between the winter king and the lentils, is purple bounty.

9:17 Yeah, so I'll just kind of compare and contrast these a little bit. So starting over with the woolly pod, like Davis said, it's actually not a true winter annual. It's a very cold tolerant spring annual. Again, some of the best overwintering woolly pod vetch that we've seen. If you're going to plant a vetch in the springtime, it's one of the most aggressive, fastest growing, biggest biomass vetches you can plant in the spring.

9:43 The Spanish vetch, frankly, is a little disappointing to me. This is hairy vetch that we brought in from Spain. We knew that it probably doesn't have as good a cold tolerance, and we're seeing that. Even you know it has less cold tolerance evidently than even woolly pod. I think it's going to be a good batch as long as we keep it further south to where the winters are going to be more mild. It's definitely a less expensive one, so we're going to just keep it in the south. The two nicest ones out here by far as we look at the plots are they are the Aumerit in what we call our Montana vetch.

10:18 The Montana vetch is obviously grown in Montana. Au merit is a fairly new hairy vetch. In the previous plots that we've had it's the best hairy vetch that I've ever seen. We'll see how it does this year. I say it in the Montana are looking pretty similar right now.

10:35 We are doing some seed production on Au merit this year. We got licensed to be able to do some of that. So we've never had very good supply of it, so I'm excited to have better supply of both of these vetches. They're both very aggressive growing. They both have overwintered quite well. Au merit looks a little better right here in this area, but as I look down through the strips, I'd say they're very similar. The Montana vetch maybe is even a little better right now down that way. So we'll really monitor this, keep an eye on it and then we'll definitely be collecting biomass samples of a lot of these as well to see what kind of nitrogen fixation production we've gotten in biomass accumulation.

11:17 Winter King is a variety that was developed more for eastern wet winters where they don't get as cold but they're going to have more freeze thaw cycles. That's a little bit different type of overwintering mechanism needed. I will see if it fills in. It doesn't look as good as these others right now. There's a stand there, it just doesn't have quite as much growth.

11:40 And then the Purple Bounty one over here, it's touted as being the earliest hairy vetch on the market. I would predict that we'll see it bloom earlier than all these others, but we want to keep a really close eye on that and we'll make good notes of when we see each one of these bloom to verify that that really is one of the earliest maturing vetches on the market.

12:01 The Winter King last year we had it in our plots and it looked about the same here in comparison to the other vetches, but it actually came on these next few weeks a little bit quicker than some of the others. And so I expect that one too, even though it looks the furthest behind out of these four. I'm excited to see that in a couple weeks. Yeah, that'll be good to see how they doing over the next several weeks.

12:25 All right, now we come to the king of all cover crops and that's cereal rye. Cereal rye is the most widely used cover crop, both within Green Cover Seed and also within the cover crop industry as a whole, mostly because it's so cold tolerant. It's so aggressive growing this time of year in the spring. It just can't be beat when it comes to that. Now we've told many of you many times that there's a big difference.

12:50 Between Elbon rye, which is where I'm standing, and all other types of rye, and this is going to be a great video to show that we're not just blowing smoke when we say that it's actually true. This Elbon rye again, all planted at the same time right at the very end of September. This Elbon rye here is 18 to 20 inches tall. What we have over here is Ryman rye, which would be considered a Northern Canadian Dakota type rye. It is about 12 to 14 inches at the most. And then where Davis is standing here is our Yankee rye, which again is more of that Northern type, and it's about, I would say it's similar to the Ryman and maybe just slightly taller.

13:34 Elbon was bred for Oklahoma. It was bred for maximum fall growth and very, very fast spring growth. And you can definitely see that. If you want something that's going to give you the most growth, the fastest in the spring, Elbon is your go-to rye.

13:51 Davis, what's your observations here? If you're wanting quick growth as soon as possible, maybe you're grazing cattle early in the spring, Elbon is a man amongst boys when it comes to rye and all other forage options, really. But I think we talked too about how it's not necessarily just about early growth or biggest growth. Maybe some of these shorter stature options right now fit better in a roller crimping situation for hitting a different window.

14:24 If you're not planting corn until the middle of May, this stuff may be too far ahead for you. You may need to go with either a Northern rye or even a triticale, which we'll look at here next. This can get out too far ahead of you. But again, for the cattle guy that wants grazing as soon as possible, man, you just can't beat Elbon for that. And it's winter hardiness is proven. Could you take it up to Canada and have overwintering every year? I don't know. But certainly for Nebraska and south, and we're growing it in South Dakota. We've got growers growing Elbon forests up in the Dakotas. So we know it moves north, but it's just hard to beat when it comes to that early, fast, aggressive growth.

15:07 And this will be the first one that will be to a stage where it can reliably roll down as well. So again, we'll continue to monitor this and we'll see what the differences are here in a couple of weeks. One other note on these ryes: you have to look pretty hard in these rows to find a weed, whereas in some of the other rows, the weeds even from the camera are.

15:27 Probably a little bit more visible. Here there's just a big difference and it's not just a matter of this being taller and you can't see them. It's just significantly better at weed suppressing.

15:38 All right now we're in the triticale plots and I think we've got five different types of triticale here. So Davis go ahead and set the table on what we've got planted here. Next to Keith there we have Forage FX 1001. Right here is Thor triticale. I'm standing in the Fridge. Next to me here is the 813 and then we have Surge as the last of these five.

16:00 So I'll just tell you a little bit of the background on all these. First of all they all look great. They all came through the winter really well. They're obviously smaller, shorter, less growth than the rye, not surprising, it's what we would expect. You know we're only looking at about 8 to 10 inches of growth right now but we know that that's just how triticale is.

16:26 The Forage FX 1001 is one of the nicest triticales I've seen, especially as you go from where we are here in Nebraska and you go north. This thing was bred in Montana and it's a real workhorse. It's truly a beardless triticale. It's going to be a really beautiful smooth looking crop when it heads out and very good growth and tonnage. You know again they all overwintered great because we had that snow cover. Had we had more of an open ground when it got so cold, I would have expected this one to look the best. It's going to have the best cold hardiness of any of these triticales in my opinion.

17:08 The Thor—Thor is a brand new one from Tri-Cal, which we grow a lot of Tri-Cal products. Thor is a new one that is fully facultative and what facultative means is that it can act as a spring type or it can act as a winter type. So it can vernalize, go dormant and come back in the spring like it's done here. But we could be planting—we're selling Thor to people and they're planting it right now. It does not have to vernalize in order to give you all the growth potential that it has. So it's a very versatile one. We're pretty excited about it. It's going to be a replacement for the Surge. They look fairly similar. It's a newer type triticale though so it's got better disease resistances bred into it. So we anticipate this one being a really good replacement for the Surge that we've had.

18:00 This is Fridge. Fridge is just kind of the old school standby. It's a public variety so you know you

20:48 And we want to have grazing as deep into the late spring early summer as possible. This is the longest maturing of all of the cereals in this plot and when we come out here several weeks later you're just going to see that this one is going to look a little slower. It's just because it's got a longer growing season it will eventually probably be as big as many of the ryes and triticales it's just going to take longer to get there.

21:12 And so the reason you'd want to do that is if you're staging your grazing you would have a willow creek field to go to last. That would be the main advantage of it. The T173 is definitely going to be a better fit from Nebraska and south the Willow Creek may be a better fit from Nebraska and north kind of yet to be seen. Willow Creek has Montana genetics the T-173 I think is coming from either Kansas or Oklahoma I'm not 100 sure.

21:39 Gore is probably one of the most widely used beardless and by the way these are all beardless except for this just regular hard red winter wheat. Gore is probably the most widely used beardless and it's actually a soft red winter wheat used in Oklahoma and south. We put it in our plots up here not necessarily expecting a lot because a lot of years we would see significant winter kill damage on it but again with the snow cover we're not seeing that this year so it'll be interesting to see how it grows out and it compares a very good grazing weed it's widely used across the state of Oklahoma for grazing.

22:18 And then of course just regular hard red winter wheat that you know guys would plant this would be more of a grain type and not a forage type. So as these grow we'll be able to kind of compare growth stages and biomass accumulations.

22:31 All right winter oats Davis these aren't supposed to overwinter here in Nebraska. We kind of we put them in every year just to show people that you shouldn't plant them this far north if you want them to overwinter. And again the snow cover is proving us wrong so we didn't have a great test of winter hardiness but it goes to show you if you have snow cover temperature really doesn't matter.

22:52 We've got the Cossack black oats here which are very popular especially in the south it's more of a forage type oat than a regular white oat. We wouldn't plant these generally in the spring we would be planting these in the late summer and letting them grow deeper into the winter. Excellent forage oat is probably going to give you more biomass and tonnage than a white spring oat overall when planted in you know that August type time frame.

23:21 An old standby, winter white oat. They both look really pretty good. You know, we'll see how they grow. The one thing that I have noticed right here, and if you're looking, not nearly as good a weed control as what we saw over in the rye plots. You just want to make a few comments on that?

23:40 Yeah, I mean, maybe it's a little bit of the allopathic effect. Maybe it's a little bit—I would say mostly just because it's not as full, it's not as tall, so it's simply not suppressing the weeds as well from that standpoint. I think the Cossack oats are just a little bit fuller, filling the row gaps just a little bit more than we have here in the Bob oats. But like you said, last year we had these in the plots and we had pretty much nothing.

24:11 Winter barley. Davis, tell us what we've got here.

24:15 Keith is standing in the Valor barley and I'm here in the 919 barley. The 919 is probably the one that we use more of right now. But what do you see for differences in genetics?

24:28 Yeah, you know, they look fairly similar right now. It's a little hard to tell. The Valor maybe looks like it has a bit of an edge. But you know, we'll see as they go along. Valor is a fairly new one. We don't know a lot about it yet. We've had some production done down in Oklahoma on it. It looks pretty promising. 919 has kind of been our standby winter barley, but it's kind of susceptible to smut in the springtime as it grows and matures, so we're looking for something that maybe has a little better disease resistance. We don't know if Valor is that. 919 comes out of the University of Nebraska winter barley breeding program, and I know that they've got some coming that are going to be replacements for this.

25:10 There's lots of winter barleys on the market out there. The thing that makes these two unique is that they're beardless. They're beardless barleys. And if you've ever seen winter barley that's not beardless, I mean, you're talking about a beard. Those things have, you know, five, six, eight inch long beards. Would be very dangerous to graze them, be would not make very good hay because of those long beards. And so the only barleys that we want to offer are going to be the beardless barleys because a lot of what we sell goes into grazing and forage type mixes. So we're only looking at those. There's, like I say, there's lots of other barleys out there, but the beardless ones, there's not that many of.

25:50 And finally, we have annual ryegrass. This is a Winterhawk annual ryegrass, which is an example of a diploid type, which are the most winter hardy of all.

26:00 Annual ryegrasses as a family just are not going to be nearly as winter hardy as the rest of the cereals. You can see that I mean this actually looks pretty good for being planted at the end of September. One of the keys to getting annual rye grass over winter is getting it established. Unlike rye which you can throw out there in December and it's going to be fine, this time of year annual ryegrass has to get some root system established in order to survive through the winter. So planted the end of September is not as good of time as if you could get it planted early September in having good rye grass establishment. So you know for all things considered this isn't bad and it will fill in, it's going to grow pretty aggressively here once it warms up. It's just not as popular, especially in drier areas because a lot of annual ryegrass has flown on in the eastern corn belt because the rains that they get, they can get it coming up before they harvest the corn, then they can get that earlier establishment and they have a better overwintering success.

27:10 So what are you seeing here Davis? Yeah, last year again when we didn't have the winter cover, the snowfall that we had this year, we didn't see much of this winter hawk. Again, that's probably mostly timing as opposed to the plant itself, but pretty decent right here, probably one that we would put more so in a mix with some other grasses and some other options rather than counting on it alone. We really like it for compaction breaking though, and we put it in many compaction breaking mixes, both the diploid and the tetraploid options. Yeah, it's got a very deep root system. So even though it's even when we come back out here later, it's going to be the shortest of all of these, it may still have just as deeper roots as any of them. It's very deep rooting, and that's one of its most attractive features.

27:58 All right, so now we have three different combinations of albon rye and hairy vetch, and I'm assuming this is probably the Montana hairy vetch, it's what we probably most commonly use here, and we're not going to go into a lot of detail in this episode. We're evaluating what kind of nitrogen production, what kind of weed suppression, and what kind of biomass we're going to get from different rates of albon rye and hairy vetch. So we've got a strip here, strip here and a strip over here. You know, as I'm looking at this rye, you know it's 18 to 20 inches tall, I actually I was measuring the other al—

28:38 But I think it's a little taller than the other L bond that's over there, and the vetch is significantly bigger and taller than the monoculture vetch. Davis, what's your initial thoughts on this?

28:48 Yeah, we've got the three rates like he said. We've got 20 pounds hairy vetch, 20 pounds rye, 15 vetch I believe, 30 rye, and then we've got 50 rye, 10 vetch. Yeah, it's amazing just seeing the difference of the vetch when it's able to have something to climb. It at least looks a lot taller.

29:12 We'll see if we actually have a different amount of biomass. We'll do some biomass cuttings of these and test the carbon nitrogen ratio. We really liked last year how the hairy vetch and rye crimped together, and so we'll see what the results show in a couple months. Again, very good stands. A little, really looking forward to what we see as these grow out.

29:36 At the end of every plot we have to have what we call the vacuum cleaner mix. So Davis, explain what we've got going on here. As we're planting these plots, we planted all the grasses first and the legumes. What we do as we're vacuuming out the drill that the reservoir is filling up with all the seeds, we mix that up at the end and then we plant it, and we've got it around the back side of the strips as well. And it's a great way to just showcase what happens when we plant things in diversity because here we've got all the different kinds of cereals. I see rye grass in here. We have hairy vetch and peas which, again, like we maybe saw in the mixes or the rye and veg combinations, it's just climbing. It has something to climb, so it appears taller. It fills in really nicely. We even have winter lentils and the clovers in here just a little bit. So it's just beautiful, and I think it provides a lot of good grazing, maybe a little bit more balanced ration.

30:44 And this, I mean, as you look down the road too, it's just exceptional growth, and I think this one would be good to take some samples on a little bit later. Yeah, I mean, there's just such great power in diversity. And again, as Davis said, we'll take the samples. I wish there was a better way we could sample the roots and the root exudates and the biology that's surrounding that rhizosphere. I don't know that we have the technology to really do that effectively yet. It's coming, I think, but we just know that this is doing great things for the soil because of all this diversity.