What is the quality of soybean forage?
When in its vegetative and early grain development stages, the soybean plant is very similar in feeding value and harvestable yield to that of more familiar forage legumes such as alfalfa or red clover. As with other forage plants, the developing stem becomes less digestible while the leaves, and in the case of the soybean, the pods and developing seed remain highly digestible. Data presented in the table with this article shows relative yields and nutritive characteristics of whole plant soybean forage at increasing stages of development. Note that while the protein and digestibility remain surprisingly constant over this range of harvest periods, the harvestable dry matter increases with maturity. Beyond R6, however, the leaf material will quickly be lost, leaving a forage material with a high proportion of high quality pods with beans and the remainder being very low quality, high fiber stems. The risk of pod and bean shatter loss also increases if soybeans are harvested much past R
