How to Grow Vetch

Vicia sativa · Also called: Common vetch, Tare, Spring vetch, Fig-leaved vetch, Akra, Vesce commune, Veza, Wicke

A common vetch plant against a pale blue sky, its thin stems carrying leaves made of several pairs of small leaflets with curly tendrils at their tips, and a cluster of bright purple pea-shaped flowers at the top.

Photo: Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)

Vetch is the crop you grow for the benefit of the next one. It fixes its own nitrogen and leaves the ground richer, it smothers weeds through a cool season when a field would otherwise sit bare, and it gives a heavy cut of green fodder or hay at a time of year when there is very little else. Turkey, Russia, Ethiopia, China and Spain are among the larger producers, and it is grown far more widely than any statistic shows because so much of it is a cover crop rather than a sold one. It is almost always grown mixed with a cereal such as oats or barley, because vetch has a weak scrambling stem and needs something to climb. Its one hard limit is the seed, which is genuinely not safe to treat as a pulse for people or as a free feed for poultry and pigs.

Growing Vetch, Stage by Stage

1. Get the land ready — Choose ground that drains, check what grew there before, and do not enrich it with nitrogen.
2. Choose your seed and planting material — Find out which vetch it is, buy it clean, and buy the companion cereal at the same time.
3. Sow the seed — Sow with a cereal in the cool season, a little deeper than a grain, and thickly enough to smother weeds.
4. Water — Vetch is grown on cool-season rain and its real enemy is standing water rather than drought.
5. Weeds, nodules and feeding — The mixture does most of the weeding, the nodules do the feeding, and your job is mostly to check both.
6. Flowering and pod set — Flowering is both a stage and a deadline, because feed value begins falling from the moment the flowers open.
7. Harvest — Cut for fodder at early flowering, or for seed when the lower pods brown, and do not miss either moment.
8. Store the seed, and be honest about what it is — Dry and store the seed properly, keep it away from every pulse in the store, and never let anybody take it for a lentil.

Common Problems & Troubleshooting

If you see: Poultry or pigs going off their feed, growing badly or dying after being fed on vetch seed, or people made ill by a pulse that turned out to be mixed with it.

It likely means: Vetch seed carries natural substances that poison animals with a single stomach and that are not safe for people, and it looks enough like split red lentil to be passed off as one.

Do this: Stop feeding it to poultry and pigs immediately and ask a veterinarian what to do next.

If you see: A crop lying flat on the ground, yellowing and rotting underneath, and very hard to cut cleanly.

It likely means: It was sown as a pure stand, or the cereal in the mixture failed, or the crop was overfed. Vetch has a weak scrambling stem and cannot hold itself up.

Do this: Sow vetch mixed with oats, barley, rye or triticale, which is what holds the crop up.

If you see: Hay that is stemmy, coarse and largely leafless, that animals pick over and leave.

It likely means: Either it was cut too late, or the leaves were shaken off while it was being turned. The leaf is most of the feed value in this crop.

Do this: Cut from early flowering to the first small pods rather than waiting for the crop to finish.

If you see: Split empty pods on the plants and round seed lying on the soil before or during harvest.

It likely means: The seed crop was left standing too long. Ripe vetch pods twist open and throw their seed, especially in dry afternoon heat.

Do this: Harvest when the lower pods have browned and rattle, rather than waiting for the top of the crop.

If you see: Vetch plants coming up through a lentil or pea crop in a later season, and vetch seed that cannot be separated out at cleaning.

It likely means: Vetch sets hard seed that survives in the soil for years, and its seed is close enough in size to lentil to be very difficult to clean out.

Do this: Do not grow vetch in a field you intend to put into lentil within the next few years.

If you see: A pale, hungry-looking crop that grows slowly all season, with no nodules on the roots when you dig a plant up, or nodules that are white inside.

It likely means: The bacteria vetch needs are not in that soil, or the inoculant died before the roots reached it.

Do this: Inoculate the seed whenever vetch or a close relative has not grown in that field before.

If you see: Plants yellowing, wilting and dying in patches from early growth, with browned or rotted roots, on ground that grew pea, lentil or faba bean recently.

It likely means: Soil diseases shared across the pea and bean family, which build up when the same family is grown too often in one field.

Do this: Do not follow pea, lentil or faba bean with vetch, and leave several years between them.

Yield & Market Value

Growing the crop is only part of the job. The last part is knowing what a normal harvest looks like where you are, and knowing what your crop is worth before you agree a price with anybody.

Remember It This Way

If you forget every other page of this guide, keep these lines. They are the whole crop, in order, short enough to carry in your head.

The seed is not food for people. Never sell it as a lentil.
Not a free feed for chickens or pigs either. Ask a vet first.
Always sow it with a cereal. On its own it lies flat and rots.
No nitrogen. It makes its own, and extra only helps the weeds.
Not after pea, lentil or faba bean. They share the same diseases.
Inoculate on new ground, and sow the treated seed the same day.
Dig one plant at six weeks. Pink nodules mean it is feeding itself.
Cut for fodder at early flowering. After that the value falls.
Turn hay gently. The leaf is the feed and it shakes off easily.
For seed, cut when the lower pods rattle, in the cool of the morning.

Test Yourself: Identification

What is this thin climbing plant with leaves in many pairs and curly threads at the tip?

The purple flowers have started. Does that mean anything for when to cut?

Why is this crop growing tangled up in grass and cereal instead of in a clean field of its own?

Honest Limits of This Guide

Several different species are sold as vetch, and they differ in hardiness, in season length and in how much of the harmful substance the seed carries. This guide covers common vetch, Vicia sativa, and says to ask a licensed dealer which species is on offer rather than assuming.
How much vetch seed a ruminant can safely take depends on the animal, the kind of vetch and what else is in the ration, and this guide is not veterinary advice. It says plainly that the seed is unsafe for people, poultry and pigs, and that a veterinarian should set the limit for cattle, sheep and goats.
Timings are given in days and seasons rather than in months, because vetch is autumn-sown in mild climates and spring-sown where winters are hard. Your cutting date is set by early flowering, not by the calendar.
Most vetch is grown as fodder or green manure and never sold, so production and yield figures describe only a small part of the crop. The nitrogen it leaves behind, which is the main reason to grow it, appears in no figure at all.

Sources

GBIF Backbone Taxonomy species-match record for Vicia sativa L. — Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Copenhagen (source)
EPPO Global Database — Vicia sativa (EPPO code VICSA) — European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization (EPPO), Paris (source)
FAOSTAT crops and livestock products — production data for vetches — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome (source)
Vicia sativa (common vetch) — CABI Compendium datasheet — CABI, Wallingford (source)

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