Sicklepod

With over a decade of expertise in content marketing, we decided to make a blog that speaks with the voice of thought leadership. Sicklepod is not about general topics, but about deep dives into topics that matter to B2B marketers and their audience.Two of the most toxic plants found in croplands and pastures are coffeeweed and sicklepod. Cattle generally will not graze the green plant unless other forages are scarce. They will readily eat the seed pods that dry after a frost. The plant remains toxic when harvested in hay, balage or silage. Coffeeweed and sicklepod toxicity in cattle cause weakness, diarrhea, dark urine and the inability to rise. There is no specific treatment or anecdote. Once animals are down, they rarely recover.

Sicklepod

Sicklepod (Senna obtusifolia) is a leguminous plant that infests soybean fields in the southeastern United States. Its seeds contain a variety of toxic, highly colored compounds, mainly anthraquinones together with a small amount of fat. These compounds contaminate and lower the quality of soybean oil when inadequately cleaned soybean seed from this area is processed. The sorting of sicklepod seed from a soybean harvest is an additional economic burden on the farmer beyond the cost of proper disposal of the weed seed to avoid worsening field infestation. Fortunately, sicklepod seed also contains substantial amounts of carbohydrates and proteins. These edible components when freed from anthraquinones have a market in pet food as well as potential in human foods because of the high galactomannan ratio of the polysaccharides.

Sicklepod seed was dehulled, and the ground endosperm was defatted, followed by sequential solvent extraction of the defatted seed meal to isolate the anthraquinones, carbohydrates, and protein components into their respective classes. Each class of isolate was spectroscopically identified.Sicklepod is a branched, annual herb in the Fabaceae (bean) family native to the eastern and midwestern US and tropical and subtropical regions in the Americas. It is found naturally in forests or natural areas in open woodlands, or fields though it has been introduced all over the world. The Latin name for the species obtusifolia comes from the word obtusus which means blunt and folium which means leaf. (Source: plants.ces.ncsu.edu)