''Astragalus falcatus'' is a species of milkvetch known by the common names Russian milkvetch, sickle milkvetch, sicklepod milkvetch, and silverleaf milkvetch. It is a flowering plant found primarily in meadows and grasslands and sometimes in open woodlands.

Description

The plant has pure yellow, light yellow or creamy yellow flowers, sometimes tinged with purple. It grows 40 to 80 cm high with leaves 10 to 16 cm long which have between 8 and 20 pairs of narrow leaflets.

Uses

''A. falcatus'' has been cultivated experimentally for dryland grazing in the US and possibly in France, and was proposed as a

forage Forage is a plant material (mainly plant leaves and stems) eaten by grazing livestock. Historically, the term ''forage'' has meant only plants eaten by the animals directly as pasture, crop residue, or immature cereal crops, but it is also used ...

crop in the USSR. However, it is one of the milkweeds containing a poisonous

glycoside In chemistry, a glycoside is a molecule in which a sugar is bound to another functional group via a glycosidic bond. Glycosides play numerous important roles in living organisms. Many plants store chemicals in the form of inactive glycoside ...

identified as ''miserotoxin''.Delena Tull, ''Edible and Useful Plants of the Southwest: Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona'', Austin: University of Texas, 2013,
n.p.
/ref>

References

falcatus ''Falcatus'' is an extinct genus of falcatid chondrichthyan which lived during the early Carboniferous Period in Bear Gulch bay in what is now Montana. Description This fish was quite small, only getting to around 25–30 cm or 10-12 i ...

Taxa named by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck {{Astragalus-stub