# What Is A Legume?

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Ag PhD
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHShd_ZAQzU
- **Дата:** 27.05.2026
- **Длительность:** 3:37
- **Просмотры:** 919

## Описание

Farm Basics from Ag PhD Episode #1468 | Air Date 5/24/26 - Brian and Darren discuss the seed pods and nitrogen-fixing abilities of legume plants.

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHShd_ZAQzU) Segment 1 (00:00 - 03:00)

AgPhD full episodes and more are now available on Acres TV, the newest ag platform connecting you to fields of information. Look for us on watchacres. tv. dot com. — During our Farm Basics time today, we're going to answer the question, what is a legume? — Well, legume comes from the Latin word legumen. I don't want to be a dictionary here, Brian, but yes, uh this has been around for a long time. Why do they call it a legume? Because that means pod or seed pod. And this is exactly what we've got. We've got plants that produce seed in pods. So, right away I think of crops like soybeans for example, that has a seed pod, or edible beans, uh or many of the pulse crops. So, we've got seed that's in pods. That's what it actually means, but what farmers think about a lot is, hey, these are crops — that produce nitrogen for themselves. — Yes. In fact, I had to look this up because that's really what I always knew it as, and then you read, oh, technically legume really means that seed pod. But anyway, what we always think about with this legume with a legume crop is the crop can fix nitrogen, and the way that happens, it's kind of a different thing. It will put sugars out into the soil to attract certain bacteria. Those bacteria will take atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into a form the plant can use. So, that's what they call a symbiotic relationship where the plant gets something, it gets nitrogen, the bacteria gets something, they get sugars. So, they work together. So, hopefully, you don't have to apply nitrogen to a lot of the legume crops out there. It's already creating that nitrogen itself. — This really is part of the practical thing that farmers are thinking about, all right, I want to put a legume out there as my cover crop and maybe it'll leave some more nitrogen for my future crop. We were over in Europe back a number of years ago and we were talking to farmers who are raising cereal grains and they said we're limited on how much nitrogen we can apply to fields, but we aren't limited in what we plant for a cover crop. So, if we put a legume in, we can get a little extra nitrogen boost that's allowing us to get higher yields. Now, let me just explain that a little bit, too. So, if we take that legume crop all the way to harvest and we take those seeds off the field, well, by that point there isn't a lot of nitrogen left in the soil. In some cases, there's nothing. But, if we're using it as a cover crop or let's say, a lot of people use this term green manure. Let's say a couple months after it's been growing, but yeah, there might be some seeds out there, but it's really not doing a whole lot yet for seeding, you can turn that over. You can till that into the ground and then, yes, you might have 100 or 200 lbs of nitrogen there and can be pretty awesome. Now, Brian mentioned with some of these crops, they're producing their own nitrogen like soybeans, for example, but if you're getting really high-yielding soybeans, there is a pretty big nitrogen demand there and the nitrogen-fixing bacteria aren't able to bring in enough, partly because they don't have ideal situations, Brian. We don't have the perfect soil pH and all the conditions just right, but they can produce maybe up to 70% of the nitrogen those crops need. So, even a legume crop, you may have to add a little bit more nitrogen to help them out. — Yep. So, whether you have a legume crop or you don't, you might have our weed of the week. We'll tell you how to stop it coming up later in the show.

---
*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/52670*