Pre-Bean Mix: Why Add Rapeseed and Flax to Your Rye Cover Crop

0:04 This is our pre-bean mix. It's a three-way mix of cereal rye, rapeseed, and flax. So, the idea here is you have three species, three plant families, planted in the fall ahead of soybeans being planted in the spring. So, these

0:19 This is October 10th established. You know, now we're standing here in early June. This is awfully mature. This would normally be terminated three or four weeks prior and have the beans already planted into it.

0:32 And pretty much all across the US, the flax in this mix is supposed to winter kill. So, we're not really going to see that come through the winter very much. But, if you get it established early enough in the fall, you can get a fair.

0:42 Amount of flax to grow and get all the benefits that plant brings to your system before it winter kills. The rapeseed is a little sparse in the mix this winter, but that's a good taproot.

0:53 That's a brassica. So often works good to bring in that plant family and just put some diversity ahead of our soybean crop. And then primarily, it's cereal rye cuz cereal rye ahead of soybeans works just so well.

1:06 And some people would say, 'Well, why are you putting things in that are going to winter kill and not be showing up out here in the spring?' And the reason for that is we want some diversity, but again, there's

1:17 Not a lot of things that will overwinter. And yeah, we could put three kinds of cereal rye or rye and triticale, but that doesn't give you a lot of diversity.

1:25 But if you can get 30 days of decent

1:39 This mix. That's mostly the rye. But we're still getting some of the diversity of root exudates. You know, flax is such a great crop at hosting mycorrhiza fungi. So if you're getting planted late, I would probably

1:55 Just plant straight rye. Yep. But if you're relatively timely or even a little early, I would go with something like this where you can add some of this diversity. And when I say timely, I think it needs 30 days before you get.

2:08 Not necessarily before a frost cuz frost won't kill flax or the rapeseed, but before you get really cold like dropping down into the mid upper teens. So for a lot of us, that'll take us out to mid-November.

2:22 That still gives us a window of opportunity. And then of course as you move south, you have additional opportunities to add diversity into these different crops. We don't have any legumes in here because this is designed to go ahead of a legume crop. We don't necessarily need that fixed nitrogen ahead of soybeans.