Sunn Hemp as a Warm-Season Legume Cover Crop

0:00 This is Sun hemp. Sun hemp is another warm season legume. It's a very tropical plant so it has an extreme amount of heat tolerance, not as good a drought tolerance as what cow peas or mung beans would be, but excellent heat tolerance. Sun hemp grows very.

0:15 Quickly, very fast you can see this stuff is 7 to 8 ft tall and it was this tall probably almost a month ago, Dale. It hasn't really grown a lot since then. Very sensitive to day length and temperature, so you don't want to plant it too late in the summer or your

0:31 Growth will be very limited. Excellent producer of nitrogen. We've seen test strips produce as much as 140 to 150 lbs of nitrogen in 60 days, so very prolific producer of nitrogen. You can see that this is starting to flow a little bit, but there's no risk of.

0:49 Seed production, you know as you move north out of even southern Texas you're going to flower. It may set a few pods down south but it's not going to be a seed producer, which is really nice. You don't have to worry about any type of volunteer issues with this.

1:05 One of the attributes of sun hemp that's both its biggest benefit and also one of its biggest drawbacks is this very hard woody stem. It's called hemp because it's used as a rope crop in its native India. It is not related to marijuana in any way, shape or form, but it is used as

1:26 A rope crop. These stems are very very fibrous and very very tough. That means unlike virtually every other legume out there, this produces lasting residue. These stems you lay them down on the soil surface, this will hold up hoof traffic. It'll hold up vehicle.

1:49 Traffic lasts for quite a while to stay as a mulch. The drawback of it is that if you have planning equipment that has row cleaners or residue managers with teeth, they can grab this, wrap it up around those row cleaners and just ball them up if you.

2:29 Get most of its height in the first 60 days. At that point, if you rolled it down or you terminated it, it's not going to have near as much of that fiber built up in there, and so it's much easier to handle that way as well. A lot of people like to terminate at about 4T.

2:44 Because that's about as tall as you can get a sprayer through. Once you get it up to this height it's going to be kind of tough to get a spray boom through here. Deer absolutely love Sun hemp, it's very popular in Deer plots. I've had some guys even use it, they'll plant it on.

2:59 Some field borders because the deer will just camp out in the sun hemp and not come into their field. We use it in some grazing mixes at low rates, you know two, three, four pounds an acre grazing catalon. We've had no issues with that and like I say for deer.

3:14 Plot sunhemp solid—the deer will just absolutely love it. Most varieties of sunhemp do contain an alkaloid that has an antiquity factor for cattle. Doesn't seem to affect sheep, deer, or goats. If sunhemp is more than half the diet in cattle for an extended period of time, there are some health issues, but we've never really seen it out in actual practice.