Grouse, the eagles are coming

Here are the eagle beans I planted on memorial day. They are really starting to come up despite the fact that we haven’t had a drop of rain in 19 days at home.

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This will be great to have a plot growing locally where I can keep tabs on the progress more frequently. Appreciate you being our Eagle Forage Soybeans test grower this year, sticker.

For my first year as the Twin Cities area dealer for Eagle Seeds, the response has vastly exceeded my expectations. A lot of customers have been growing the Eagle Forage Soybeans for years by getting seed from Eagle, but at a tremendously high shipping cost. I’m happy to be able to offer the seeds without high shipping costs to MN and WI customers.

Across the board, I’ve heard nothing but good things about these Eagle Forage Soybeans from experience growers. They main benefit is that they are Roundup ready forage soybeans that grow well even under heavy browsing pressure. Many of the food plotters with larger farms also have very high deer numbers and standard ag beans could not take the browsing pressure.

Another benefit is I didn’t know about is that Eagle Beans do not have a genetically programmed dieoff like many ag varieties do. The idea with ag beans is that farmers want them to grow just long enough to mature, and then they want them to die quickly and uniformly to take advantage of in-field drying time before harvest.

None of this is a benefit to food plotters. We want our beans green and growing as long into the late season as possible and this is what the Eagle Forage Soybeans do–keep on growing until the lack of sun and frost causes them to start dying naturally.

Would love to hear from any others who are growing Eagle soybeans. Will post updates.

Grouse

Grouse I planted Eagle beans for 2 years in a row when they 1st came on to the scene. Loved the way that they could take the deer browse. With my land being in North central Wisconsin and not having a real long growing season, I never got the Eagle beans to make pods. They would get to the flowering stage but than the heavy frosts would come and kill them. This would leave me no pods for late season hunting. My conclusion was that Eagle beans are a great summer food source but not so good for producing pods for late season hunting. Hope you guys have better luck than I had.

This isn’t a case of bad luck, Tom. Your Eagle Beans were doing exactly what they are supposed to do.

Eagle Forage Soybeans are designed to produce maximum tonnage of leaf and stem mass per acre and to have the highest protein content in the stems and leaves. About 10-15% higher protein than ag beans. The pods are almost an afterthought and they will never set pods like an ag bean simply because that isn’t what they’re bred to do.

Ag beans are just the opposite, bred for absolutely minimum stem and leaf mass, and the maximum number of pods.

I would agree that they are a great high protein food source, but whether or not ag beans are better for late season depends. If you have low deer densities or have lots of ag crops around you such that your deer leave your plot of Ag beans alone, then yes. Ag beans will have pods and be there for late season food.

The problem is if you have a lot of deer and/or very little ag to serve as an alternative food source, then your field beans will never survive the browsing to produce pods. By late season, you’ll just have a field full of soybean stumps. This is far and away the biggest reason I hear from land managers who are buying Eagle beans. They tried ag beans and were left with a stubble field by the end of the growing season.

As with everything in food plots, it’s choosing the best seed for your situation and conditions.

Grouse

Here they are one week later. Going strong with the hot weather and rain.

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Looks great!

Weekly update of the Eagle beans. I am guessing they will be canopied by the end of next week.

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Weekly update on the Eagles. The fist pic are Eagle beans, the second pic are ag beans planted the same day about 100 yards away. I used the same planter and the same seed rate. It’s pretty obvious already that the Eagles are growing much quicker. A quick look and I couldn’t find any browse pressure on either plot, but I do have a cam on the ag beans and the deer have been in there regularly.

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I sprayed both the eagle and ag beans last night with gly. I am very curious to see how the eagles compare to the ag beans when being run over by the ATV while spraying. The ag beans have always bounced right back. Time will tell…

Just 4 days later and you can hardly tell I was in the plots with the ATV/sprayer. Both ag beans and Eagle beans bounced right back. The Eagle beans are almost completely canopied, the ag beans have a ways to go yet. I would say the Eagle beans are twice the size of the ag beans already.

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Weekly update on the eagles vs ag beans. The eagles are about 32″ tall and the ag beans are about 24″

I have a trail cam on each plot as of last week. The ag beans seem to get more attention at this point, but that could be because that plot is further back and a little more secluded.

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Another test for the Eagle beans. Apparently we got some pretty good wind Wednesday night as you can see from the picture. The eagle beans got laid down pretty good. It will be interesting to see if they can bounce back. The ag beans had little or no damage from the wind, but are not as tall as the eagles were.

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Here are a couple pics with deer in them for size reference of the ag beans vs eagles.

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Eagles are still looking good despite the ag beans being heavily browsed and starting to yellow.

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Eagle beans still green and growing strong. The deer are starting to come back to them and browse them.

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