Safflower as a Cover Crop: What We Learned from Our Test Plot

0:00 This is safflower. Safflower is a broadleaf type plant. It's an oil seed crop like sunflowers. Doesn't get nearly as tall. Doesn't have nearly as big heads, but it has a lot more of them.

0:10 And inside that head is a seed that has about 40% oil content. So it's really good for protein and oil and energy. The problem with most safflower, and I don't know how

0:25 Well you can see it here, and I'm not going to grab one to pull it up because that's the problem. Very spiny. If you grab that, you'd have a handful of thorns, almost like a thistle type thorn.

0:34 Safflower varieties are very very spiny and thorny. And so, because of that, cattle will pick these pods off and eat them, but for the most part, they're not going to eat the

0:45 Majority of the plant is very deep rooted crop. It's got decent heat tolerance as well as cold tolerance. The frost is not going to kill this. This plant here has matured and is ready.

0:56 Producing seed. But most safflower varieties have the spine on it. Now we have over here this is one of the few spineless varieties of safflower in the world. This was developed by Montana.

1:09 State. We purchased the marketing rights for this. I will pull this one up. I can handle it because there's no spines on this. So this is a spineless safflower variety. We call it baldy.

1:32 Mixes because it's going to be a nutritious plant for cattle. And once the spines are taken out through the breeding program, I think it's going to be very palatable as well. I think

1:43 It's going to have a lot of utility. As you can see, the seeds tend to stay in these pods. If you're doing say a stockpiled sorghum program, which gives you a lot of biomass but not much.

1:56 Protein in the winter time, we think that these seeds could be a standing in the field protein supplement for some of the lower protein stockpiled forages. And just going back to the

2:10 Spiny safflower, it actually does have some advantages if you're really creative. I've heard of people planting a barrier of safflower around young fruit trees to keep the deer and rabbits off of them. I've even heard of people surrounding lambing pens with spiny safflower to keep coyotes out. That thorniness can have advantages, but in most situations, we think the Baldi is going to do everything this does only with the advantage of having complete palatability to grazing livestock.