Soybean Meal as an Organic Fertilizer
Soybean meal is a good choice for promoting leafy growth and overall plant health. This meal is what's left behind after expelling the oil from soybeans.
The meal is loaded with protein, which is why it's normally sold as a food for pigs, cows and chickens, available in feed stores.
If you read the print on a bag of fertilizer, you'll see that the nitrogen inside is offered as ammonium or nitrate ions. These two types of nitrogen are appetizing to plants.
Plants that prefer really acidic soils want their nitrogen provided as ammonium ion.
Place soybean meal in the soil and the microorganisms living there first change the protein into amino acids, then break down the acids to make ammonium ions, and, ultimately, nitrate ions.
If and when you add this meal to enrich your soil, you're working into a planned natural system for feeding plants. Damp, warm weather encourages soil organisms to work harder, and this is the same weather that makes plants hungry and causes them to grow quickly.
Even though soybean meal can feed any plant, it's not perfect for this purpose. Any organic material abundant in protein would do just as well. However, soybean meal is cheap and obtainable.
Cautions
Two cautions should be considered when applying soybean meal or any of other fertilizer. At the beginning of the season, when the soil is chilly, microorganisms are inactive. So the nutrients provided by the meal may not be converted to what the plants prefer.
Vegetables with fleshy leaves, like lettuce and celery, may need some assistance from some fast-acting, dissolvable fertilizer, that is, either a synthetic fertilizer or an organic fertilizer like fish emulsion.
Even though soybean meal is rich in nitrogen, it's not the only element that plants need. Provide plants with a well-balanced diet by perpetually improving the soil with lots of organic material, like leaf mold, wood chips, straw, manure and compost.
Most soybeans grown in North America now are genetically modified beans. If you want to keep genetically modified organisms (GMOs)—in this case, plants—out of your garden, don't use soybean meal.
And if you're a market gardener looking for organic certification, you'll have a hard time obtaining it unless you can prove that your soybean meal came from certified organic soybeans.
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