Cover Crop Dinner is a multi-course, sit-down meal where we imagine and taste a future agriculture where cover crops are once again grown and eaten in order to establish healthy farms and soil.
Did we get it right the first time? Will we be heading back to the future now that industrial farming has reached its expiration date? A cover crop is nature’s pesticide, herbicide, fertiliser and nitrogen fixer. Rotational farming using cover crops has been practiced since the age of Ancient Rome and continues to be implemented globally, with interest rising even on monoculture corn farms of the USA.
The crops include beans, grasses and brassicas so the choice is wide. We propose a cover crop cuisine, and we are not the first. Recipes have developed all over the world after millennia of cover-cropping. These range from the fermented Turkish millet drink Boza, to the famous Japanese buckwheat soba noodles and pickled Arabic lupins.
Our plates will reflect the potential market for culinary cover crops – if an extra incentive to adopt a farming system that is cheap, soil-enriching and low maintenance is needed.
Could monoculture farms of today become the biodiverse farms of tomorrow?