Purple Top vs. Hybrid Turnips: Which One for Your Spring Grazing?

0:00 [Music]

0:12 All right, now we're in our turnip plot. Over here on my left we have just a regular purple top turnips that everybody's quite familiar with. And here on my right we have a hyper turnip. This is the Viva, sometimes it's also called.

0:25 The V, but depending on where it was grown, but it's a hybrid turnip. It's a purple top turnips that was crossed with an Asian leaf vegetable to get this type of plant, and they both are very, very good spring planted forages as you can see. There's a tremendous amount.

0:41 Of forage biomass right here and unlike the radishes these turnips are not bolting turnips and some of the other ones that we'll talk about they only go reproductive when they brutalized Vernal eyes means it has to get cold enough for that plant to kind of go into a dormant.

0:55 Stage and then wake up and start growing again. And because we planted these in April, it was not cold enough to burn Eliza, so these things will grow vegetatively throughout the summer. This is what you want if you want a spring planted Brassica for grazing.

1:09 Don't want the ball team like we saw on the radishes. You want all of this massive forage grow, and so these are both good options. The purple top turnips again is kind of the old standby. The Viva or the vibrance probably one of the dáil, one of the things that these were.

1:25 Bred specifically for regrowth. And so if you're going to be doing multiple grazing and want lots of regrowth, that might be worth the extra money to buy the hybrids because they do tend to have a little more aggressive regrowth. So Dale, why don't you tell us a little bit.

1:39 About the difference between the purple top and the hybrids, those the above ground and the below ground parts right. I mean they're both turnips but the purple top, the old standard, the thing we're after on it is the brief because this is a carbohydrate storage.

2:16 Is stored in this plant and in the fact that the animals feed the entire plant, not just the tops. The drawback of that is that once this is eaten you don't get anymore—it's a one-and-done grazing pass.

2:31 The hybrid turnips on the other hand, this is all below ground. This is not...

2:37 What the animals are after. They're after these leaves and when they come in here, eat these leaves off, this will grow back time after time. So this can be used for multiple grazing flushes instead of the one and done. You also look at the difference in the leaf enos of it.

2:55 There's quite a bit more leaf pulling up there available for grazing and it comes back time and time again, say maybe used for multiple forms. Right, and a lot of the purpose of these hybrid brassicas it was originally intended for sheep grazing and you know how hard sheep graze.

3:10 Things yes so these things really have some good regrowth ability so if you're looking for multiple grazing I think it's worth a little bit of extra for the hybrid but I turnips otherwise it's hard to go wrong with just a good old purple top in a spring grazing mix.