Spring and Winter Peas for Grazing and Nitrogen Production

0:00 [Music]

0:13 All right, deal. We have a really sweet treat here—literally, these peas look as good as any spring-planted peas I think I've ever seen. The weather

0:23 Conditions have really been good for growing these peas. You can see they're still blooming but they've also got some early pod set here to see. And I say it's a sweet treat both to look at because there's a beautiful looking crop but you can also eat these. These are edible you.

0:38 You can eat the pods, you can eat the flowers, you can even eat the leaves. So if you're into kind of collecting your own salad out of your cover crop plot, these are really good to add. So we've got two types of peas here that we'll talk about, the ones on my right, the taller.

0:52 Ones are in spring for its peas and the ones over here on my left are the Austrian winter peas and so we'll talk a little bit about the differences between them, what we're seeing and why you might use either one of them. Most commonly we would use this 4010 spring.

1:10 Forage for you first of all we would want to use a 4H P rather than like a yellow field pea mainly because two things so that's important to us both in a grazing situation nitrogen production situations for each situation but also because the seed size is significantly.

1:34 Smaller in that in the seeds are very very hard and tough as compared to a yellow pea. A yellow pea if you look at it wrong it's going to split the fall apart in a stock of a germinate very difficult to handle. It's very difficult to maintain good quality seed both of.

1:49 These plants the seed size is significantly smaller. These in fact are probably smaller than a soybean, whereas if yellow field pea is significantly larger than a soybean but they're also very hard and they don't split. Here Lee is easy so we can run it.

2:18 Spring annual versus a winter annual, although it's surprising how well these winter peas look. We're really not having fertilized them, they just aren't quite as far along, but they're still doing a good job of producing nitrogen.

2:32 Forage, these plots are very, very clean. If you get a good stand, peas there are not any weeds that are going to grow up through that. Yes, and you can see this is of all the spring plant pulse crops that large seeded grain legumes, the 4010 forage peas are.

2:55 Always my first go-to when someone says I want pay or grazing. They just make more biomass than the others I've used. This extensively and just works better than any other spring planet forage.

3:14 Of course one of the other benefits of all these legumes is the nitrogen.

3:22 Fixation. If you can see right here, they're not big and round like what soybean nodules are, but you can see all the nodules all over up and down these roots. And that's one of the main benefits of growing these pulse legumes is that you can grow a fair amount of nitrogen in a very short period of time. It doesn't take as long as it does some of the smaller seeded legumes like, say, sweet clover or crimson clover, which can fix more total nitrogen but they take longer to do it.