14.10.2026

European agriculture faces the challenge of reducing the existing protein gap and decreasing its dependence on imported soy as animal feed (Freund et al. 2025; Hristov et al. 2024). Forage legumes such as lucerne, red clover, white clover or incarnate clover offer considerable potential in this regard. They provide local, farm-based sources of protein and are also suitable for locations where intensive crop production is only possible to a limited extent. Various studies show that forage legume-based cropping systems can make an important contribution to increasing European protein self-sufficiency and transforming land use towards sustainability and resilience (Tomic et al. 2023). Beyond their role as a source of protein, forage legumes provide a range of desirable ecosystem services. Against this backdrop, forage legumes are increasingly being discussed as a key component in the European debate on more sustainable feed bases and more resilient production systems (Notz et al. 2023; Panagea et al. 2025). At the same time it is difficult to assess the actual relevance of forage legumes in European agriculture today. Neither the extent of cultivation nor the regional distribution of individual species can be reliably quantified on the basis of available statistical data. In many databases, forage legumes are either not recorded at all or are grouped together in collective categories such as ‘fodder plants’, ‘clover and other fodder plants’ or with grassland, so that the range of species and the acreage disappear in the statistical data maze (Lampach et al. 2025). This means there is a lack of transparency regarding the extent to which small-seeded forage legumes actually contribute to closing the protein gap and in which areas targeted support measures would be particularly effective. Against this background, an exploratory qualitative expert survey was conducted to specifically examine whether there is as little reliable knowledge about the numerical situation of forage legumes in Germany and the European Union as a look at the current statistical databases would suggest. This article reports on the key findings of this study, with a focus on data availability: the central question is to what extent experts can provide reliable information on the regional distribution of these crops, or whether they are just as much in the dark as the official statistics.