Photograph: Andy Hall/The Guardianįor thousands of years, farmers across west Africa have cultivated fonio – a kind of millet that tastes like a slightly nuttier couscous or quinoa. “Everything that’s new was old once,” said Matthew Blair, a professor at Tennessee State University and co-president of the Amaranth Institute.Īmaranth has found its way into European kitchens, with Ukraine coming in as the crop’s largest producer on the continent.įonio: the drought-resistant traditional grainįarmer Jeane Pierre Kamara 49, sows fonio cereal seeds on freshly plowed land along with fellow farmers in the fields of Neneficha, south-eastern Senegal. Like fonio, an African grain, amaranth is not a new crop, but one that is experiencing a resurgence as communities adapt to the climate crisis. Today, Indigenous farmers in Guatemala, Mexico and the US are collaborating to grow this drought-resistant crop. However, the plant continued to grow as a weed and many farmers saved amaranth seeds, passing them down for generations, until their descendants were allowed to grow it again. In the Americas, Spanish colonizers banned the Aztecs and Maya from growing amaranth when they arrived on the continent. A complete protein with all nine essential amino acids, amaranth is a good source of vitamins and antioxidants. While amaranth leaves can be sautéed or cooked into a stir-fry, the seed is commonly toasted and then eaten with honey or milk. Across Africa and Asia, amaranth has long been eaten as a vegetable – whereas Indigenous Americans also ate the plant’s seed: a pseudocereal like buckwheat or quinoa. Standing up to eight feet tall, amaranth stalks are topped off with red, orange or green seed-filled plumes. Photograph: Picture Partners/Alamyįrom leaf to seed, the entirety of the amaranth plant is edible. Indigenous farmers have long grown this drought resistant crop, which is now experiencing a resurgence. Here’s a look at five crops, beyond rice, wheat and corn, that farmers across the world are now growing in hopes of feeding the planet as it warms:Īmaranth: the plant that survived colonization It’s that we don’t even know that we’ve lost that diversity,” says Chris Smith, founder of the Utopian Seed Project. It’s only recently that I realized the greatest sadness isn’t that we’ve lost that diversity. “You hear all the statistics like, ‘We’ve lost 90% of our varieties’. It has also meant losing out on the resilience other crops show in surviving drought and other natural disasters.Īs the impacts of the climate crisis become starker, farmers across the world are rediscovering ancient crops and developing new hybrids that might prove more hardy in the face of drought or epidemics, while also offering important nutrients. That reliance on a small number of crops has made agriculture vulnerable to pests, plant-borne diseases and soil erosion, which thrive on monoculture – the practice of growing only one crop at a time.
Today, just three crops – rice, wheat and corn – provide nearly half of the world’s calories.
But over time, farmers gravitated toward planting those with the largest yields. O ver the course of human history, scientists believe that humans have cultivated more than 6,000 different plant species.
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