Okay, so don’t tell my dad, but I stopped by one of our soybean fields last night during my run so I could give an up close look at the soybeans as they’re growing and developing. 

As you can see, the plants are still fairly short, even for this time of year, but they’re starting to get loaded up with pods. Thankfully, we got some rain recently and the plants really benefited from it. While most other corp yields are pretty much determined at this point, soybeans still have the ability to put more flowers on, more pods, and even continue to grow. On the flip side though, they could also abort flowers and pods and decrease yields.

According to Brian and Darren Hefty, as long as the plant is green the yields can change.

For now, if you push back the leaves, like I did below, you can see that there are pods all around on the inside of the plant Those pods have obviously taken the place of the purple flowers we saw a few weeks ago. Many of the pods have reached their full size at this point, but of course the plants may continue to produce more as the season progresses.

I picked a couple of the pods (seriously, don’t tell my dad…) so you could see them up close! Right now they’re covered with all this furry stuff. I was not aware until I was doing some research for this post, but apparently once the pods and beans inside get a little bit bigger, that’s when soybeans are used for cooking. But be careful — eating raw soybeans is not good for you, because our bodies cannot properly digest raw soybeans.

Open up the pod and right now it looks like this below. The lighter little round things will eventually get bigger and dry into soybeans as we’re used to seeing them. Of course, right now they’re fairly small. The beans themselves are still growing inside the pods.