Lupins

Soya UK

Member
Location
Hampshire
Can lupins be grown organically? We grew vetch with peas years ago; but I’d like to try Lupins.
Lupin / triticle for wholecrop works very well organically (neither crop suffers much pest or disease) and the competitive nature of the mixture can help with weed suppression.
Harvesting mature lupins with a combine would be OK if the weed control was OK, but often it isn't and there's too much green junk in the field.
Some growers accept this, since the sheer cost of organic soya makes organic lupins worth it - even if it means low yields from combining a field that is 50% fat hen....
The fact that you can use lupins as a direct replacement for soya makes them a very attractive proposition when organic soya meal is weighing in at £700 per tonne.
 

Soya UK

Member
Location
Hampshire
like that then, not so suitable for your dairy cow or late preg. early lact. ewe ...........but .i suppose lupins would be more for finishing stock.

The lower starch bit is interesting,mind you less acidosis trouble feeding them i should think ,Soya is a bit feisty in that respect. especially as a meal /ground like it is.

I grew yellow flowering ones yrs and yrs ago, and iirc the sheep found them a bit unpalatable. that wouldve been fed whole.
Found a study to suggest heat treating Liupins (also beans and peas) can improve the DUP. Remember soya and rape have already undergone this process. But lupins have high oil content which can suppress milk protein.

White Lupins are 11% oil, and blues are 6% oil. Given the relatively low inclusion rates, the oil is never an issue. The benefit of heat-treating lupins is marginal, whereas the benefit is greater in peas & beans. This is because the bypass rate of untreated peas & beans is around 15%, whereas untreated lupins have a bypass rate of around 25%. The other big difference is in the sulphur amino-acids. Lupins score big-time on this as they have a lot of cysteine, lysine & methionine. There are lots of old studies that suggested lupins were low in them, until they realised that the analysis techniques weren't detecting them properly. (As a general rule - anything you find on Google about lupins that is more than 10/15 years old, should be well & truly ignored since it will almost certainly be cobblers.....).
 

Soya UK

Member
Location
Hampshire
@Soya UK have they been tried under plastic to help with the heat units?
Not to my knowledge Nitrams - i don't know of anyone who has tried that. I doubt it would be beneficial though, since lupins don't really need heat to grow (they grow perfectly well in Orkney, or Finland or Iceland - unlike heat-driven crops like Maize or Millet or soya).

What is important, is growing the right lupin in the right area for the right job. The loss of Reglone means that areas like Hereford, or Wolverhampton, or North Lincs where we once would have grown white lupins for combining, are now blue lupin areas, since we no longer have the "get out of jail" card of using Reglone as a finisher (you can use roundup, but it's not ideal).

With blues, you can combine them anywhere in the UK - Aberdeenshire / Cumbria etc. no problem.

For forage, you can use blues and whites pretty much anywhere, since the long senescence period of the whites doesn't matter when you are wholecropping it. Blue lupin / triticale mix is usually foraged in mid/late August, whilst white lupin / triticale mix is usually cut at the end of August or early September. You can use spring wheat instead of triticale, and blue lupins will also partner with oats quite well. Lupin / barley mixes don't work because the barley matures too early.

The most important thing with the foraging of lupins / lupin mixtures, is not to cut too early. Cutting too early gives you a semi-palatable pile of rumen-degradeable nitrogenous mush. If you want nitrogenous mush in the rumen, then use red clover (or urea). Cutting at the right stage means the quality amino-acids have been formed, and you are then unsiling something that has soya-grade protein (and thats the game-changer).
 

Nitrams

Member
Location
Cornwall
Sorry I saw @soya and my mind switched straight to soya and forgot this was a lupins thread. What i meant to ask was has soya been tried successfully under plastic in the uk
 

Pan mixer

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Near Colchester
I put them in pig rations when I grew them, not quite a direct substitute for soya but definitely cut the soya down. I just ground them in my hammer mill.

I had huge problems with pigeons then drought, yield disappointing, not growng again, land too heavy and too many geese if the pigeons leave enough.
 

Soya UK

Member
Location
Hampshire
@Soya UK What is the price and availability of blue lupin seed?
Hi - I'm afraid we are all sold out of white and blue lupin seed for the Spring 2021 season. If you'd like to have a go for Spring 2022, it'd be best to get in touch September / October time to book seed, as we usually are all sold out of Lupins by Christmas. Cost per acre on Blue Lupin Seed for Spring 2021 was £55 per acre.
 

Soya UK

Member
Location
Hampshire
Sorry I saw @soya and my mind switched straight to soya and forgot this was a lupins thread. What i meant to ask was has soya been tried successfully under plastic in the uk
Been tried, but the "success" was debatable. The soya grew well enough, and managed to break through the biodegradable plastic OK. Also, the plastic helped to stop the pigeons and stopped the seedbeds drying out by sweating plenty of moisture up. The downside was the extra wheelings required to lay the plastic in beds. The modified drill / plastic laying machine, was laying beds that were about 1.5 metres wide, and then we had a set of wheelings. The extra wheelings cancelled out any extra benefit that we gained from the plastic, so we ended up with the same yield, but £100 per acre poorer due to the cost of the plastic.

The other issue is that soya physiology isn't that easy to hoodwink. Excessive heat /light early on, can cause the plant to start flowering early (no bad thing you might think), but it also can lead to crops being inordinately short. Annoyingly, it does not necessarily lead to earlier harvest as it might do in maize, since the soya flowering is regulated by photoperiod as well as growth stage.

The long & the short of it was that we decided that whilst keeping the pigeons off and keeping the seedbeds moist was very desireable, growing soya under plastic was not going to work at all. We concluded that the way forward is to breed varieties which are early enough and high yielding enough to offer a realistic gross margin whilst being drilled with conventional seed drills.
 

Soya UK

Member
Location
Hampshire
@Soya UK What is the price and availability of blue lupin seed?
Hi @Wobblebox - The bad news is that there is no seed left at all. It was all gone by November.

Partly due to us losing some seed crops, and partly due to a realy high level of interest. I think there's no doubt that the lupins will see a fair resurgence over the next year or two. With soya becoming so expensive, I think there will be huge demand for the lupins - being about the only thing that can truly replace soya (certainly in pig & poultry diets).
Normally it costs £55 per acre for seed which is pre-inoculated and delivered on-farm. In the case of blue lupins, you get 60kg per acre, and for Whites, you get 75kg per acre for your £55...
 
Hi @Wobblebox - The bad news is that there is no seed left at all. It was all gone by November.

Partly due to us losing some seed crops, and partly due to a realy high level of interest. I think there's no doubt that the lupins will see a fair resurgence over the next year or two. With soya becoming so expensive, I think there will be huge demand for the lupins - being about the only thing that can truly replace soya (certainly in pig & poultry diets).
Normally it costs £55 per acre for seed which is pre-inoculated and delivered on-farm. In the case of blue lupins, you get 60kg per acre, and for Whites, you get 75kg per acre for your £55...
Could they be grown with spring oats for combine and fed whole to lambs ??
 

Soya UK

Member
Location
Hampshire
Could they be grown with spring oats for combine and fed whole to lambs ??
You can feed whole oats and whole lupins to lambs no problem - they digest them OK - and yes, its an excellent feed.

As to whether you would grow them as a mixed crop for combining, I'd say its pretty debatable. For wholecrop, yes - lovely mix and you can clamp it or bale it no bother and its a brilliant feed.

If you are combining, I suspect, you'd be better having the oats in one field, and the lupins in a separate field, and then you can give them both their specific agronomy. You'd combine them separately, and then you'd mix them in the ratio specific to your needs / formulation. Growing them together for combining doesn't bring any advantages - whereas growing them together for wholecrop does confer a number of advantages.
 

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quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

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