GRIFFIN, Ga. – For more than a century, farmers used velvetbean to control weeds and build up soil mass in their fields. Today, University of Georgia researchers are taking a new look at the benefits of this old favorite.
“Weeds don’t like velvetbean. And they contribute tons of biomass per acre,” said Nicole Martini, a horticulture graduate student with the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. “Those were two reasons farmers planted velvetbean.”
Farmers also favored the crop because it provided food for livestock and nitrogen for the soil.
But velvetbeans can provide much more, she said.
When Martini’s grandfather was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, she told him that a drug used to treat the disease comes from a plant she was researching.
A few months later, he noticed on his medicine bottle the name of the plant: velvetbean.
Many cultures have used velvetbean to treat conditions from depression to snakebite. But it’s fairly new as a pharmaceutical in the United States
Its healthful properties come from a high concentration of LDOPA, a precursor of the neurotransmitter dopamine. This may be the reason why most insects avoid it.
Velvetbean was a favorite farm cover crop in the South for more than 150 years. It disappeared from the rural landscape in the 1950s, when chemical fertilizers became less expensive.
With growing concerns over chemical inputs, agricultural researchers have been looking at the velvetbean again.
Martini’s experiments in Georgia focus on biomass production and weed control using the Georgia Bush variety developed by UGA cover crop researcher Sharad Phatak.
At the UGA campus in Tifton, Ga., Martini and other UGA scientists planted velvetbean to evaluate its benefits.
Only 120 days after planting, velvetbean produced 65.6 tons of fresh biomass per hectare (about 2.5 acres) and about 50 percent more biomass than Sunn Hemp, she said.
This supports the theory that velvetbean can be used to improve the organic matter content and fertility of soils in Georgia, Martini said.
“We also found that a solution prepared using residue of velvetbean in water reduced growth of crabgrass, sicklepod and pigweed,” she said. “It did not eliminate them, but it did reduce them.”
In addition to improving the biomass of his soil, a farmer would see fewer weeds if he used velvetbean as a summer cover crop before planting fall vegetables, she said.
Those soil-improving qualities combined with the potential for selling beans to the pharmaceutical industry could mean a major comeback for velvetbean.
“Farmers are more inclined to use cover crops if some part of that crop also has economic value,” Martini said.
The velvetbean study was funded by a grant from the Southern Region Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program.
