Spring Barley Varieties: Grain vs. Forage Types
Keith and Dale walk through two spring barley varieties—Lacey and Leviathan—and explain why you'd choose one over the other. You'll see the difference between a bearded grain barley and a beardless forage barley, and learn how each performs for cover crop, livestock feed, and grain production.
View Transcript
0:00 [Music]
0:12 Now we're going to talk about spring barley dale. We've got a couple different spring barleys here that we're going to look at. One is the lacey spring green.
0:21 Barley and one is the leviathan and the main difference is that the one that's grown for grain part of the reason it's grown for grain is because if you look at the seed head it's got really but we
0:44 Would not really want to turn cattle out here and try to graze this because these beards are, you know, four to five inches long even rolled up in a hay bale. This could be problematic so we.
0:54 Wouldn't really want to see this in a situation where it's going to be going through an animal as a 4H as opposed to the Lelaina barley. It is a beardless type barley, there's no beard on this at.
1:05 All in this a little longer season. This is you know really already pollinated and it's filling grain. This is just maybe done pollinating. That head hasn't fully extended and emerged yet.
1:18 Definitely going to be a much higher degree in quality of forage here. So we would sell this to people that well, if you just want a cover crop, this is going to be a little cheaper because it's a.
1:29 Better seed yield and it's going to have every bit as good at cover properties or they're our feed bots that like to buy beef barley. There are breweries that like to buy.
1:53 Different purposes both can be planted in the spring and grow very well. Yeah, forage quality on barley is almost as good as oats. The vegetative quality photosynthetic area they act just like a.
2:15 Leaf when it comes to photosynthesis and as much as a 20-25 percent weight of the grain in the head actually comes from the off. So having arms really gives you a higher potential brain feels bigger.
2:32 Back yeah you got a bigger factor it's just like having leaves the photos directly into the greens and another benefit is drought tolerance this is like a built-in windbreaks.
2:47 So it's honey helps reduce wind velocity over the grain and so you can give a little bit and added drought tolerance from the beard versus a bit of this, at least as far as grain production. Obviously during the forage part this has been a very good.