Purple Top Turnip for Winter Grazing: 2025 Test Plot Tour

0:06 Okay. So, this is a purple top turnup.

0:09 Why does it have that name, Nathan?

0:11 Yes. The names of this product were very clever in their creation. This is probably one of the most common cover crops. You know, if you talk about rye and oats, turnips.

0:21 And radishes are right there after it. This is a plant that we can position in a lot of different ways. One of the best things about purple top turnips because they are so common is they're pretty cheap. So this is a lowcost seed. It has a lot of good uses. You know, we can put it in grazing.

0:36 Mixes. We put them in corn inner seed mixes. If you're like a seed corn guy and you're looking to kind of, you know, at male destruction go in and broadcast some seeds to soak up some of the, you know, excess nitrogen in your system, this plant can do it and put all that nitrogen right here and then when

0:51 It breaks down, it releases it back to the system. As you go farther south, purple top turnips can be an overwintering brassica. Here in Nebraska, they're pretty much just going to winter kill. There'll always be a couple that make it through, but for the most part, they're going to.

1:03 Winter kill.

1:04 Yeah. So this turnip is bringing forage value in a couple of ways. So the top, so the turn, these turnip tops, the turnip greens have a lot of nutritional value in them. Now they're not going to be as high a protein as a collard, but they're going.

1:17 To be higher protein and more palatable than say like rape seed. Yep. So they will graze these tops off pretty well and then these bulbs and we've seen some of these things get huge if they have enough nitrogen, enough time to grow. And that's a storehouse. That's a reserve of energy and we've

1:36 Seen cattle graze these turnip bulbs all winter long. And they just keep kind of gnawing them off and eating down into the ground. So in the right situation, you can get some early grazing and then get some storehouse or stockpile grazing here as well. Now, just one concern.

2:08 Generally, not a full grain full grown cow, you know, they got a big enough throat that just goes down. So, if that's a concern, and certainly could be, then you would go with a hybrid turnip that doesn't have a bulb, or you go with the collards. But, you know, these are just

2:22 A good old standby, relatively inexpensive, grow really quickly and are really a great storehouse for energy in your soil.

2:30 Yeah, the turnip greens will regrow a fair bit. Like, if you grazed it off now, I mean, the turnip would regrow. It would keep going because it's a biennial.

2:37 So it's just going to keep for this entire first year, you know, putting energy in that bulb, making leaves, putting energy in the bulb. It's going to try to overwinter. It would then make seed next spring. When I've grazed it with lamps before, they'll come through and they'll take quite.

2:49 A few bites in the first grazing out of this out of the turnup bulb. And this bulb's about just over 60 days old here. And then surprisingly, the turnup can still regrow even with quite a few bites taken out of it. It's still able to just keep growing. So there's definitely more productive, you know, maybe safer options with other brassicas, but it's a pretty cheap option sometimes and so it has a lot of uses.