Lost Crops of Africa Volume II: Vegetables (2006) / Chapter Skim
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5 Cowpea
5 Cowpea
Pages 104-117
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From page 105... ...
Grain legumes, in other words, act like nutritional cogwheels, making everything else go round and round in proper order. Luckily for the particular malnourished millions in Africa there are grain legumes for almost every local soil and climatic zone.1 In the specific areas most at risk of hunger and malnutrition, though, the leading locally domesticated candidate is cowpea.
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From page 106... ...
And, perhaps because of its African birth it beats out other legumes for performance on a variety of soils and an adversity of conditions found across this multiform continent. Indeed, cowpea has been called "a nearly perfect match for the African soil, weather, and people." This crop originated as an inconspicuous little creeper among the rocks of the dusty southern Sahel and the bone-dry upper rim of central Africa.
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From page 107... ...
In that great sweep, covering half of Subsaharan Africa, two hundred million children, women, and men live off the plant -- consuming the grain daily whenever supplies make that possible. Widely appreciated by the poor, cowpea is not only rich in protein but in digestible carbohydrate too.
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From page 108... ...
Indeed, we have dedicated a separate chapter to a cowpea variant called long bean, which developed far from Africa's shores and now deserves better back home. Seeds Traditional West African cooking has found a variety of uses for this food.
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From page 109... ...
Those haulms can also be dried, bundled, and stored away for the dry months when little else is around to keep domestic creatures happy and healthy. Green Manure Cowpea fixes nitrogen efficiently, with amounts of up to 70 kilograms per hectare per year added to the soil.
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From page 110... ...
Further, seeds that get damp from rain or excessive humidity before being harvested start sprouting inside the pods while yet on the plants. LIMITATIONS Under conditions of subsistence agriculture, the average yield of dry seed normally ranges between 100 and 300 kg per hectare.
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From page 111... ...
And within six months little that is edible remains. Food prepared with even partially infested grain tastes bad, and selling seed exhibiting even a few of the telltale beetle holes is difficult.
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From page 112... ...
Demand for cowpea fodder far exceeds current production, and a ready market exists for cowpea haulms, which can command nearly the same price as cowpea grain. Some emphasis should be put on this usage, even though feeding animals may seem a roundabout means for getting food to people.
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From page 113... ...
Its seeds provide quality protein and other essential nutrients that complement the otherwise unbalanced diets that the poorest sectors are forced to stomach. This farmer is growing a dual purpose cowpea developed by International Institute of Tropical Agriculture and now being widely adopted by farmers as a crop to feed both humans and their animals.
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From page 114... ...
It makes on farm storage and factory storage problematic." In this regard, an appropriate technology was developed at Michigan State University in the 1980s. Researchers discovered that simply turning the sack in which beans are stored is enough to virtually eliminate weevil damage.
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From page 115... ...
Seychelles: brenm (in Seychellois Creole) Namibia: omakunde, olunya (white with black eye)
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From page 116... ...
Of total world production, about 80 percent comes from Nigeria, 80 percent of whose harvest comes from the parched northern states of Kano, Sokoto, and Borno. Beyond Africa Cowpea is an important crop in some tropical American countries, especially in northeastern Brazil.
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