Douglas Feltner, age 12, of London, Kentucky, for his question:
What exactly is millet?
If you have a pet bird, chances are you have purchased a few small helpings of millet cereal. Our budgies, canaries and other caged birds enjoy its gritty little seeds. Millet crops on a small scale are grown in several of our farm regions for bird seed and hay to feed cattle.
Americans have been called a corn fed people. Indian corn, alias maize, is our basic cereal. It feeds the chickens and cattle that provide our meat and dairy products. Corn flour is used to make our tastiest breads and cakes. Corn oil is a basic cooking ingredient with dozens of uses. Corn is our basic cereal because this domesticated member of the grass family is a native New Worlder that happens to thrive in our climate. When it comes down to it, cereal is the basic item on many breakfasts. But our rich, golden corn refuses to thrive in many densely populated regions of the world.
People of warm, muddy regions, depend on rice as their basic cereal. The cereal grain called millet likes a drier climate with either a warm or hot summer season. Its feathery crops thrive in parts of India and China, Africa and Russia. Altogether, millet is the basic cereal on the diet of one third of the world's human population. Its bird seed grain feeds the chickens and its hay is fodder for the cattle. Its flour is rich in proteins and minerals, fats and vitamins. But it does not work with yeasts to make spongy doughs. Millet bread, though nourishing, is flat and rather heavy.
The basic cereals on the human diet are descended from weedy ancestors of the grass family of plants. Each in its own region has been cultivated for untold ages. As farmers selected the best seeds for planting, the cereals improved through countless generations. This selection of the best also produced varieties of the basic cereals. America cultivates dozens of varieties of corn for different purposes. There are also varieties of millet.
The average millet plant is a tall, straight tuft of leafy spikes arranged around several stalks that are crowded with clusters of tiny seeds. The crop is ready for harvesting after three months of the summery growing season. Most millet varieties are named for their bushy, stalks of seeds. Ripe crops of broomcorn millet look like fields of little brushes. The foxtail millet, naturally, has bigger and bushier stalks of seeds. The finger millet waves tiny seed tufts like outstretched hands in the sum¬mer breezes. The common barnyard millet resembles its wild ancestors and might be mistaken for a field of grasses. The tall, thin seed spikes of the cattail millet can be grown in poor sandy soils where the climate is too hot and dry for the cultivation of any other cereal.
In America, we have our golden corn and do not need to depend upon large crops of rice and millets. Fields of millet, however, are grown in certain warm summery regions of Kansas, Texas and Missouri, in Canada and the Dakotas. These small scale millet crops provide all the bird seed we need for our feathered pets, plus hay for some of our cattle.