If you’re not a soybean farmer, it’s hard to get a good idea of what soybeans really look like. Driving past soybean fields only gives you a glimpse, after all. So one of the things the Missouri Soybean Association wanted to do with its Center for Soy Innovation is show non-farmers exactly how a soybean develops.

To accomplish that, we researched the soybean life cycle, which is broken into a number of distinct stages. Then, we created an artificial soybean for the first four vegetative stages and each of the eight reproductive stages. These lifelike reproductions of the soybean’s life cycle means that consumers can see at a glance how the soybean matures and what the differences are at each stage.

Besides the soybean life cycle display, we created three standalone soybeans as well. These models show both mature and harvest-ready soybeans, and two of them include the soybeans’ root structure (down to the distinctive nodules on the roots). Each lifelike soybean plant is designed to be as accurate as possible.