Farming Connect is a Welsh government-funded service aiming to provide farmers with information and support to help their businesses. As part of the project’s work to share the latest developments and thinking in agriculture with farmers in the field, experts from the University of Aberystwyth’s IBERS centre are producing a series of technical articles, which can be found here.

This is the latest of them, which looks at the results of recent studies trialling lupins as a form of home-grown protein for livestock and poultry.

• Lupins are high protein, high energy, nitrogen-fixing grain legumes.
• As a crop, lupins offer an alternative to imported soya as a UK-grown vegetable protein source which can be used as part of fish and livestock feed.
• This can provide a good source of cost effective, supply-chain secure protein.

By Dr William Stiles: IBERS, Aberystwyth University

Lupins (Lupinus spp.) are a genus of flowering plant in the legume family (Fabaceae) perhaps most famous as an ornamental favourite of gardens, where their large, colourful flowers make them popular with horticulturalists. However, there are over 150 different species of lupins some of which are ideally suited to agricultural production in the UK, due to their nature as nitrogen fixing grain legumes that develop seeds with high protein and high energy contents, which can be grown effectively in northern climates. There are three lupin species of agricultural significance in the UK at present: narrow-leafed (L. angustifolius), white (L.  albus) and yellow (L. luteus).

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