Above: the term “sovescio” has a long history in Italian agricultural studies. It’s properly translated as “cover crop” or “green manure.” But “sovescio” denotes, in particular, cover crops that have been sowed by breaking the soil and planting the seeds at different depths below the surface, depending on type of seeds and the desired effect. Not all cover crops are planted in this manner. The etymology of the term is uncertain but most philologists speculate that it is derived from the spoken Latin “subversiare,” meaning to “turn under” (image borrowed from a post by my client Bele Casel, an organic Prosecco producer).
Every time I fall down a rabbit hole like this one, I am reminded of a famous aphorism by the twentieth-century Austrian essayist Karl Kraus: “The closer you look at a word,” he wrote, “the more distantly it looks back” (see this note on a word’s “aura”).
The term sovescio is rendered in English as cover crop or green manure.
As Justin noted in an email, these days “you can’t talk to an Italian wine grower without them mentioning that word.”
The practice of planting cover crops to replenish nitrogen levels in farmland soil dates back to Roman times.
“First consideration belongs to the lupine [a legume],” wrote Columella in the first century C.E. (De re rustica), “as it requires the least labour, costs least, and of all crops that are sown is most beneficial to the land. For it affords an excellent fertilizer for worn-out vineyards and ploughlands; it flourishes even in exhausted soil.”
But the practice of planting cover crops as a means to improve soil “health” became a hot button issue in early nineteenth-century Italy when Piedmontese chemist Giovanni Antonio Giobert published his revolutionary research on sovescio and its farmland application. His experiments centered on the use of rye for green manuring (crop rotation was another focus).
His work was met with unbridled disbelief in some quarters. After his greatest detractor, Count Carlo Verri, issued his response refuting Giobert’s findings, one of their contemporaries noted that their dialectic represented the dawn of a “new era” in Italian agriculture.
Ultimately, Giobert’s theories were embraced by hundreds of Italian farmers according to the anonymous author of an 1820 report on Verri’s polemic.
Today, as Justin observed, the popularity of green manure among Italian grape growers is growing rapidly as more and more of them embrace organic and biodynamic farming practices.
That’s good news for all of us, at least in my book. But it seems that the novel technique isn’t as new as some would think.
Thanks for reading… and thanks, Justin, for suggesting the entry.