Pre-Corn Cover Crop Mix: Winter Barley, Hairy Vetch & Camelina

0:04 This is our pre-corn cover crop mix. This is a product that we have for sale on our website. It's a simple mix. It's a three-way blend of winter barley, hairy vetch, and some camelina. We've got a grass, a legume, and a brassica. Three species put together.

0:22 This was October 10th planted. Here, we're in early June now. So this mix is looking kind of mature, kind of rank. Here in south-central Nebraska, this would have been terminated and had corn planted into it, you know, 3 to 4 weeks prior to today.

0:39 And so, you would have seen the barley at a much earlier stage. The vetch wouldn't be near as into the flowering as it is now, but here we are. So, it looks really good.

0:49 We had the barley come through the winter very nicely. The vetch has now

0:53 Climbed up and overtaken the entire stand. It's flowering. It's fixing nitrogen and it's just a good, simple mix to kind of accomplish your goals and prepare your field for that next corn crop.

1:06 So, winter rye is such a great cover.

1:08 crop, but one of the difficult things with it is planting corn into cereal rye can have to have a lot higher management on it because the rye is going to tie up nitrogen so much more. So, that's why in this mix we went with winter barley. Now, it's not going

1:24 To be as aggressive growing, probably not going to be as good of weed control. It's not going to have as much forage value, but that's not the goal here. The goal is to just prep our ground for planting corn. So winter barley is going to be less.

1:40 It's going to have less nitrogen tied up than what rye would, so it's easier to plant corn into it. Especially if we're terminating this, you know, 3 to 4 weeks earlier. It's just not going to be as mature, and what nitrogen it does have is going to release it quicker.

2:10 So certainly there would be a point in time where you could roll it down. But if you're not an organic producer, it could also easily be sprayed out and have your corn planted into it. Now we didn't see a lot of camelina overwinter in this year.

2:24 We didn't see that in most of our plots. For whatever reason it was kind of a tough year on camelina for us here in Nebraska. We have reports from further south of it doing overwintered. So we'll continue to try it, but it's just a relatively simple mix.

2:40 This would be a good one for someone who's just getting started and they want a cover crop to plant after soybeans and to plant their corn into. This is going to be a safer option than planting into just straight cereal rye.

2:53 There's just there's not a ton of

2:54 Options. You know, when we get phone calls for guys they're wanting diversity fall planted. You know, if you work with green cover and you've ever done like a summer mix, you know, we can put 15, 20 things through the summer or spring time. But when we're in Nebraska and north, the list of things that can overwinter are pretty short. So like for some of your NRCS programs, like you need to do a diverse mix. And so these are just three of the things that can often work the best ahead of corn and for overwintering.

3:21 And this would qualify for most of the multi-species NRCS mixes. So it's a good option for that scenario.