Legume
Legumes are grown agriculturally, primarily for human consumption, but also as livestock forage and silage, and as soil-enhancing green manure.
Well-known legumes include beans, chickpeas, peanuts, lentils, lupins, mesquite, carob, tamarind, alfalfa, and clover.
The term pulse, as used by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), is reserved for legume crops harvested solely for the dry seed.
[3] However, in common usage, these distinctions are not always clearly made, and many of the varieties used for dried pulses are also used for green vegetables, with their beans in pods while young.
[4] Some Fabaceae, such as Scotch broom and other Genisteae, are leguminous but are usually not called legumes by farmers, who tend to restrict that term to food crops.
In the soil, the amino acids are converted to nitrate (NO−3), making the nitrogen available to other plants, thereby serving as fertilizer for future crops.
[18] Abiotic problems include nutrient deficiencies, (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, copper, magnesium, manganese, boron, zinc), pollutants (air, water, soil, pesticide injury, fertilizer burn), toxic concentration of minerals, and unfavorable growth conditions.
Two rules apply to moisture content between 5 and 14 percent: the life of the seed will last longer if the storage temperature is reduced by 5 degree Celsius.
[20] Cultivated legumes encompass a diverse range of agricultural classifications, spanning forage, grain, flowering, pharmaceutical/industrial, fallow/green manure, and timber categories.
Others, such as Leucaena or Albizia, are woody shrubs or trees that are either broken down by livestock or regularly cut by humans to provide fodder.
[31] Legume species grown for their flowers include lupins, which are farmed commercially for their blooms as well as being popular in gardens worldwide.
Industrially farmed legumes include Indigofera and Acacia species, which are cultivated for dye and natural gum production, respectively.
[32] Others, including the black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia),[33] Kentucky coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus),[34] Laburnum,[35] and the woody climbing vine Wisteria, have poisonous elements.
[36] Traces of pulse production have been found around the Ravi River (Punjab), the seat of the Indus Valley civilisation, from c. 3300 BC.
Archaeological evidence suggests that these peas must have been grown in the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamian regions at least 5,000 years ago and in Britain as early as the 11th century.
[39] The oldest-known domesticated beans in the Americas were found in Guitarrero Cave, an archaeological site in Peru, and dated to around the second millennium BCE.
[40] Genetic analyses of the common bean Phaseolus show that it originated in Mesoamerica, and subsequently spread southward, along with maize and squash, traditional companion crops.
