Contents and Purpose

Forage legumes are not used as widely and efficiently in pastures as desirable.  One of the main reasons for their under utilization is that animal producers are not familiar with the range and variety of forage legumes.  There are forage legumes adapted to almost every pasture system. The purpose of the Forage Legume section of Oklahoma Forages web site is to familiarize user with these species and encourage use of better forages.

Audience

The ultimate audience is forage producers and livestock producers; however, much of the information may reach them through county extension educators, agricultural consultants, and crop scouts.

Organization

Currently there are images of more than 60 forage legume species.  A few species have only 1 or 2 images. In the Oklahoma Forages site, a total number of forage legume images is about 750.  Our Oklahoma Alfalfa Production Calendar has 511 images and includes production, pests, harvesting, etc.

Image sizes in Oklahoma Forages are about 15 to 50 KB, rarely greater than 100 KB.  These images are downloadable over a modem in less than 30 seconds.  Most of these images can be downloaded over a modem in 5 to 10 seconds.

The production practices and images in Oklahoma Forages are grouped according to species.  In addition to groups of images by species, there are also comparisons of:

seeds	seed pods
flowers	leaves

Several people contributed in various ways to the production of the Forage Legume section of the Oklahoma Forages web site.  This site was created by John Caddel, Forage Agronomist, and  Nancy Trusler, undergraduate student, of the Plant and Soil Sciences Department.   Ms. Trusler spent many hours designing the web site, creating formats, and taking and editing images.   Other undergraduate students, Gretchen Haymaker and Andi Acre, spent many hours creating formats and taking images.

Funding for the Forage Legume section of the Oklahoma Forages web site was provided by the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service and the Oklahoma Agricultural Experiment Station.

Web sites such as the Forage Legume section of the Oklahoma Forages are never finished.  New information including images and publications will be incorporated to the site as it becomes available.

Comments to assist in the development of the Oklahoma Forages web site are welcome and can be sent to John Caddel. Links to other web sites about forages are welcome.  Send your URL.

John Caddel, Forage Agronomist, 
Professor of Plant & Soil Sciences

john.caddel@okstate.edu