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Neustanthus is a genus with one species, Neustanthus phaseoloides (tropical kudzu, also called puero), a deep-rooted climbing perennial legume grown as a forage and cover crop in the tropics. It is most often grown as a cover crop in plantations such as oil palm, rubber, and coconut.
Neustanthus is a monotypic genus of flowering plants belonging to the pea family Fabaceae and its tribe Phaseoleae. The only species is Neustanthus phaseoloides, called tropical kudzu. This species is a forage crop and cover crop used in the tropics. It is known as puero in Australia and tropical kudzu in most tropical regions.
It is related to the genus Pueraria and artificial hybridization with P. montana var. lobata has been achieved. Prior to 2016, the accepted name was Pueraria phaseoloides.
Neustanthus phaseoloides is indigenous in east or in southeast Asia. Today it has been introduced and naturalized in a broad range of other wet tropical environments: Africa, Americas and Australia. N. phaseoloides prefers to is grow in ruderal situations, such as plantations of cocoa or banana, at low altitudes (often under 600 metres above sea level) in wet evergreen or monsoon forests. N. phaseoloides is capable to growth in a large soil spectrum. Acid soils are not a problem and the pH tolerance is between 4.3 and 8.
Neustanthus phaseoloides is grown as a cover crop (often with centro and calopo ) in oil palm, rubber and coconut. The main advantages of using N. phaseoloides as a cover crop is the comparable high nitrogen accumulation and the improvement of the soil structure due to its deep rooting system. It can be used as a grazed forage crop and as green manure in crop rotations. Furthermore, it can be used to prevent soil erosion on sloppy soils. In Africa it is mainly used as cover crops in plantations whereas in tropical America, south-east Asia it is used as forage crop in mixtures and as cover crops. In Malaysia its extracts are used as medicine.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Neustanthus by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
