Researchers awarded $2.7m to develop faba bean
Thanks to its high nutrition and cool-weather hardiness, the faba bean poses great agricultural promise for feeding a changing world, according to scientists at Virginia Tech in the US. The bright-green legume has been enjoyed as a diet staple for thousands of years in Africa, Asia, and the Mediterranean. Just one cup of faba beans has 13 grams of protein — making it a better protein source than most other legumes — along with plenty of fiber, potassium, and iron. Plus, it’s a good cover crop that helps improve soil health, slow erosion, and control pests, disease, and weeds.
But you don’t often see it in the fields or on the menus in Virginia. That’s why researcher Maria Balota is piloting a US$2.7 million multistate project funded by the US Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture Specialty Crops Research Initiative to introduce the faba bean as a sustainable fall and winter crop in the mid-Atlantic region.
“Growing resilient crops to climate change is one way to achieve agricultural sustainability in an evolving environment,” Balota said. “We can improve traditional plant varieties’ tolerance of more extreme temperatures and rainfall through breeding. But in addition to this strategy, we can scavenge for crops that fit this new environment naturally. Faba beans are a cool-season legume that fit well into the winter production systems of the mid-Atlantic.”
Federal and state incentive programs reward the planting of cover crops as a climate-smart practice that reduces erosion and runoff, improves soil health, and supports bees and other pollinators. Virginia farmers grow over 430,000 acres of cover crops, predominantly as a means of enhancing soil nutrients before planting cash crops in the spring.
The researchers hope that the faba bean will prove to be a sustainable cover crop and cash crop that brings nutritional, environmental, and economic benefits to the region.
Image: Getty/PavloBaliukh