Hot Outside? Try Growing Cowpeas, "The World's Toughest Bean

Cowpeas were domesticated independently in both east and west Africa over 5,000 years ago. They were spread by the Bantu people of southern West Africa, people skilled at developing high yield crops. By 2500 B.C., cowpeas travelled east and then north along trade routes, arriving in the Mediterranean region by ancient Roman times.  

Cowpeas came to the Americas along two separate routes. Spanish conquerors carried them to Mexico and California in the 1500’s. They arrived in the southern U.S. in the 1600’s,  directly from West Africa on slave ships. Cowpeas continue to have deep cultural significance in the South, grown in home and market gardens from Texas to Virginia.  

George Washington Carver (c.1860 – 1943) was prominent American scientist, inventor, educator, and champion of  Black farmers.  Carver, whose parents were born enslaved, encouraged farmers to be self-sufficient, to look to the land for what they needed rather than going into debt to buy fertilizer, a practice advocated by ‘scientific agriculture.’  Instead, he taught farmers to use compost compost and grow cowpeas to restore the South’s soil that had been depleted by cotton.  Read more on Carver here.

Today, cowpeas are a staple crop in many parts of the world including Latin America and Southeast Asia. They are the major source of protein in  sub-Saharan Africa,  widely grown by subsistence farmers, mostly women, who plant them as they have for hundreds of years, intercropped with maize, millet, and sorghum. These and other subsistence farmers around the world face mounting challenges from climate change, war, and economic inequality - challenges that threaten both the yield and the nutritional value of their crops.  

'California Blackeye 46'

 Cowpeas come in thousands of varieties.  Some grow as short, upright bushes. Others grow on a trellis or on the ground to cover the soil. The cowpea packets you received from Planet Earth Observatory are called ‘California Blackeye 46’.   They are the beans you will.  most likely to find on the shelves of grocery stores across the nation (although they are probably. not  among  the cherished varieties passed on by home gardeners in the South.)  California Blackeye 46 grows as an upright bush about 2’ tall with a canopy of about 60”. They were developed at UC Davis to resist fusarium wilt and are also somewhat resistant to root knot nematodes.  

The Journal of Agronomy defines ethnic crops as "non-mainstream crops introduced to the United States from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Caribbean." With the changing ethnic background  in the United States, minority populations are  projected to increase from  20.4% in 1980 to 50.1% by 2042.  This demographic, the journal's editors state,  " brings with it a rapidly changing food culture, increasing quite rapidly the diversity of ethnic crops  that needs to be characterised as an evolving powerhouse of the US agricultural economy." Following up, the journal published a 2021 article claiming: "Cowpea constitutes a large portion of the daily diet among many people in Africa, Asia, Central America, and Southern America...With the projected increase in the minority population in the United States... it is expected that the consumption of cowpea in the nation will increase substantially."