Potential of Some Neglected European Annual Legume Crops for Forage Production

There is a general trend of re-introducing currently neglected and underutilised crops into diverse farming systems and providing them with novel roles in contemporary agriculture, which is faced with numerous challenges. One such novel role could be the use of traditional grain legume crops for forage production. One of the essential traits needed for improving the potential of quality forage production in faba bean is a decreased proportion of lignin in forage dry matter, providing more slender stems with a higher nutritional value for feeding ruminants. Hairy vetch demonstrates a wide variability of agronomic traits and may be regarded as having great potential for utilisation in breeding and developing new cultivars for forage production and green manure. The future breeding efforts will emphasize chemical composition, especially crude and digestible protein and fibre content. Despite its relatively short stem length, bitter vetch may serve as one of the best ideotypes in breeding annual forage legumes because of its large number of photosynthetically active leaves and its extremely good utilisation of growing space. The indeterminate stem growth is one of the main obstacles in developing the grass pea cultivars with both high forage yield and reliable seed yield. This trait is equally important in hairy vetch, and needs to be efficiently solved for both forage and grain production.