Has anyone used fava beans as an “edible” cover crop in cooler tropical areas? I just started playing with it a year ago and found it to produce tremendous amounts of nitrogen. Plus the leaves are tasty and high protein, providing the opportunity for something to eat even using it as a cover crop prior to planting warm season crops. Of course it is used as a food crop many places but I’m thinking about it as a dual purpose cover/food source that can be cut down at flowering time to provide Nitrogen fertilizer for the following crop.
Greetings David,
I’m experimenting with it after reading about it in Roland Bunch’s book. However, something to keep in mind before sharing it around is that people with G6PD deficiency (which can be a significant number of some ethnic populations) can develop a serious and sometimes fatal hemolytic anemia from eating fava beans. For example, in Haiti where I live, supposedly about 25% of the (mostly black, African-decent) population has some degree of G6PD deficiency.
Joel
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Hiya,
Joel makes a good point above, as my family has some Egyptian blood - one of brothers has G6PD. For years he was jaundiced, we thought he had hepatitis or some other diseases… It got worse too when we went to live in India. As he grew older he started eating super healthy, gave up ice cream and other goodies and made his own soya milk and stews with lots of beans - he loved his pressure cooker.
He was working in IT on the computer programming system for a blood bank at a hospital and one day all he had to eat that day was a packet of fava beans and - bam! He ended up in ICU needing a blood transfusion. The guy who worked at the blood bank walks in and sees him lying there and he’s like “You! What are you doing here?!”
Anyhow, we’re thankful he didn’t die… And more than that, as fava beans were the only thing he’d eaten it helped them work out that he had G6PD (favism) and once he had that diagnosis alot of other things made sense - and he could eat ice cream again!
About cover crops - nope - I’ve never tried them faba beans- anyone tried them in the Sahel? I have tried lablab -they grow it in more clayey soils here in some area - I had sheep once and they LOVED lablab hay. My favourite for hay/ forage here though is cowpea - there is a market for it, seed is readily available and it’s super easy.
As for your idea - is there no market for the hay? - I’m sure it will be really good for the soil - just wondering if it will look wasteful to plough or mulch all that good looking animal food. If manure is purchasable would it be a profitable option to sell the hay and buy manure or fert or to coral some animals on the field to eat the hay and camp on the field for some months to improve the fertility?
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Most of the Nitrogen in a legume cover crop is in the above ground parts - making hay removes most of the N whereas grazing keeps most of it in the field. For a hay crop a grass-legume mix is better to avoid any danger to the animals from a pure legume forage. If it is a true “cover crop” then it can be tilled in but perhaps a better option is to cut it down and leave it as mulch. The N is not lost as microbes quickly break down the plant and the N goes into the soil. Fava beans doing very well in a cool winter climate but don’t like hot weather.