Pea cultivar is successfully tested for green manure and soil cover

Promising horizons for the cultivation BRS Sulina, a pea variety suitable for green manure and soil cover in the cultivation of large crops, such as wheat, corn, soybeans and beans. A partnership between Embrapa Hortaliças and the company RAIX Sementes Ltda. is evaluating the potential of legume seeds for cultivation in a mix of cover crops (mixture of grass, cruciferous and legume species) in biomass production, nitrogen input and tolerance to soil diseases, and has been presenting very encouraging results.

“The cultivar showed rusticity and adaptation to different types of environments, with good biomass production even in medium and low fertility soils, in addition to showing potential for use in intercrops with other cultivars, grasses (oats and rye), forage turnip and in rotation schemes, preceding corn and soybeans, among other crops”, records Ana Maccari, researcher at RAIZ Sementes, who has been following the trials. According to Maccari, the results obtained in these studies will make it possible to base decisions when recommending the cultivar in terms of adaptive regions for the formation of soil cover consortia in direct planting systems (SPD).

Based in the municipality of São Miguel do Oeste, in Santa Catarina, the company RAIX Sementes works to identify alternatives with the capacity to generate benefits involving increased sustainability of production systems. The establishment of the partnership between the two institutions had as its starting point the field day promoted by the Fundação Agropecuária de Pesquisa Agrária – FAPA (Guarapuava-PR) in 2021, when BRS Sulina drew the attention of company representatives, when presentation of technological innovations available for cultivation in the autumn and winter off-season.

Following the initial negotiations, which included the formalization of the agreement between the company and Embrapa Hortaliças, trials began to be conducted in different environments and sowing times to evaluate the adaptability, agronomic potential, production cycle and dry mass yield of the cultivar - According to the first evaluations, BRS Sulina has become an “excellent alternative for green manure and formation of soil cover during the autumn/winter empty period”.

BRS Sulina

A legume suitable for green manure and soil cover, the BRS Sulina pea variety was developed in joint research between Embrapa's Vegetable and Wheat Units. The material was brought in 2010 to the Federal District, where a milder climate prevails at a thousand meters of altitude and, in the experiments conducted at Embrapa Hortaliças, materials were selected that showed rusticity, resistance to diseases and, mainly, volume of green mass.

With a yield of around 1,5 tonnes of grain and around 13 tonnes of green mass, the variety outperforms alternatives such as vetch, oats and turnips. Extremely adapted to the Southern Region, due to rapid initial growth, precocity and uniformity, BRS Sulina provides major cost reductions to producers in different segments, with reduced dependence on chemical fertilizers for subsequent crops.

The ease and stability of seed production of the cultivar are superior to other winter annual legumes, such as common vetch and hairy vetch. The suitability of the grains for the formulation of animal feed, mainly pigs, also represents another alternative for using BRS Sulina.

For researcher Warley Nascimento, general head of Embrapa Hortaliças, the results of the experiments that have been carried out by the company RAIZ Sementes represent an additional endorsement of the characteristics of the cultivar, “in addition to enabling the producer to diversify species for this purpose, which is soil cover and crop rotation, mainly for the Southern Region of the country, where this sustainable practice has been adopted by a large number of producers”.