Soybean Quality Problem
By: Rome Ethredge
There’s been a soybean harvest quality problem that has to do with maturity of the seed. If the plant isn’t allowed to mature all the way we can get seeds that don’t turn the mature tan color. This green color is a problem for processors of the soybeans. It results in truckloads being turned down upon inspection at the buyer or at least the price being docked.
I’ve seen this occur in a couple of different situations this year in Georgia. The first is when we may desiccate or terminate the crop too early. With our early system (mainly group 4 soybeans) we often use a chemical desiccant due to the problems with seed quality going down quickly at least partly due to them maturing during a more rainy time of year.
The problem is doing it too early. We can and did see this year some green seed problems due to this. In the UGA Pest Control Handbook, Dr. Eric Prostko has good instructions concerning the timing of each chemical desiccant starting on page 260 in the 2019 edition. Here’s a link to the soybean section. https://extension.uga.edu/content/dam/extension/programs-and-services/integrated-pest-management/documents/handbooks/2019-pmh-chapters/Soybeans.pdf
The other situation where we are seeing green seeds is where we had intense dry weather and heat with no irrigation and the plants shut down too early. Nothing to be done about this but pray for rain at the right times.
