There’s a big difference between making food and feeding people.
Making food is an industry. With competition and growth goals and cost cutting and marketing tricks. Feeding people is a calling. With a sense of responsibility to where that food comes from, and how it comes to be on someone’s plate. A lot of the latter falls on farmers.
Because they’ve been tasked with keeping us all fed. Making this food affordable. Raising it a certain way—that might not be the way they were taught, or can afford. Protecting the land—which might not even belong to them or have been cared for properly in the past. With each season, they’re challenged to wring as much value as possible out of every single acre.
Meanwhile, the food chain is being nudged in the direction of prioritizing plants. For generations, education pushed dairy and meat to the center of the table, to own the plate. But it’s not sustainable. We’re at a pivotal moment, where the food pyramid is getting flipped, and people are realizing that loading up on vegetables and fruits and other plant-based products is key to human survival—both in nutrition and in food chain longevity.
This focus on plant-based foods is good for the long term, but there are weak links in the chain. Steps where, whether it’s in ingredients or processing or product manufacture, a cheap solution is chosen over the right one. So even if a farmer’s committed to sustainable cultivation methods, a step or two down the chain, their hard work to do everything right might be undone.
Enter Prairie Fava.
A Canadian company who’s noticed that there’s a way to get a particular plant protein to market, and to preserve the good intentions and hard work that goes into its cultivation.
The Fava bean is incredibly nutrient-dense, is higher in protein and fiber and lower in fats and carbs than any other pulse. And the Fava plant is hardy, providing high yields even in cool, moist conditions.Cultivating Fava has benefits beyond the harvest: it’s a great nitrogen fixer, storing a remarkable amount in its roots to nourish the soil when it’s tilled under at the end of the season.
The bean has been cultivated since the Bronze age, and is apart of culinary traditions from Egypt to China to Italy and beyond. But in North America, over generations, cooks and eaters lost track of the origins of their recipes, and the tradition of using Fava beans.There’s a serious need for safer, smarter crops to empower farmers to safely and judiciously get another harvest out of a season. And there’s a growing demand for ingredients and foods that deliver nutritional rewards without draining planet resources.
So Fava beans can make a come back in North America. Along with other pulses and all the other plants that are better for the human body—and be a significant part of the food-pyramid flip. Prairie Fava comes with five generations of know-how in putting farmers’ interests first. A family farm operation that evolved into a seed company that now is taking on the biggest challenge of all: Feeding the world by controlling one food’s journey, from seed to people’s tables. Reintroducing the Fava bean as a solution for farmers.
A savior for soil,
an ingredient for plant-forward companies and a game changer for healthy eaters. So that it makes sense to fill our fields with Fava beans, and our plates with a huge serving of a plant-filled future.
