Ames company turns to ancient grain to fight food insecurity

Dryland Genetics’ high-yield proso millet a substitute for other grains as climate change reduces water supply

BY MICHAEL CRUMB

Patrick Schnable, co-founder and CEO of Dryland Genetics, believes if you can increase production anywhere in the world, it helps with hunger everywhere in the world.

The Ames-based company he leads is working on developing a higher-yield-producing version of an ancient grain as it seeks to find a more sustainable and environmentally sound way to feed the world.

Dryland Genetics, based at the Iowa State University Research Park, is working with proso millet, a grain that takes less water and little to no nitrogen application to grow. They want to create a market for the grain, which has been used in China for more than 10,000 years. There is evidence it was grown in Greece up to 8,000 years ago and eventually made its way to other parts of Europe, where immigrants would later bring it to the United States.

“This is one of the oldest domesticated crops in the archaeological record,” said James Schnable, co-founder and chief technology officer of Dryland Genetics and a professor of maize quantitative genetics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “It’s traveled halfway around the globe. It’s been underpinning parts of civilization for millennia, and yet no one knows what it is today.”

What is Dryland Genetics?

James Schnable and his dad, Patrick Schnable, both plant geneticists, founded Dryland Genetics in 2014 after the younger Schnable discovered proso millet’s potential to grow without water after accidentally leaving some plants in a greenhouse while he was doing his postdoctoral research at the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. 

“I was looking at grain crops and I just ordered 20 of these from the seed bank, and was growing them and extracting RNA. But being busy and perhaps not being as detail-oriented as I should be, after harvesting the tissue that I was doing my projects on, I just forgot the plants in the greenhouse,” Schnable said. “I was supposed to be watering them, but I wasn’t watering them because I forgot they were there. I came back a month later and not only had the proso millet not died, it actually completed its whole life cycle. It flowered, it made seeds, and not a huge number, but it had made grain.”

He said he learned that proso millet produces more grain per unit of water than any other grain crop, “and I became fascinated by this. Why isn’t anybody working on this? And it turns out, really nobody has.”

Where is proso millet grown?

Proso millet is primarily grown in the U.S. in northeast Colorado, western Nebraska, and parts of Kansas and South Dakota. But it’s suitable for the entire western Corn Belt and much of the Plains.

As producers adapt to the changing conditions brought on by climate change, more areas could become suitable for growing proso millet, Patrick Schnable said.

“My anticipation is we’ll be able to grow higher-yielding varieties of proso millet further north,” he said. 

Proso millet is also grown in Russia, Ukraine, Australia, India and South Korea.

The work Dryland Genetics is doing is comparable to the work corn and soybean seed breeders do to develop a higher-yield product for producers.

Dryland Genetics operates with a team of about a half dozen people and outsources its actual seed production, contracting with growers and seed dealers in Colorado.

The new varieties it is developing began showing up on farms last year, and this year the number of proso millet acres planted nationwide is about 600,000. Acres planted with Dryland Genetics’ variety total about 5% of the market, or about 25,000 to 30,000 acres.

“Most of [those producers] are seeing between a 10% and 40% increase in grain yield from our proso millet versus the stuff from the 1990s that everyone has been growing until now,” Patrick Schnable said.

Schnable said those increases are similar to comparing today’s corn seed to hybrids of the 1990s.

“They would see a big yield increase,” he said. “Basically that’s what’s happened here. … Using statistical breeding that we became familiar with over the years, we were able to use that to jump-start the yield increases in this crop. It had just not had any significant scientific breeding.”

Applications for proso millet

Proso millet is commonly used for human consumption in other parts of the world. In China it’s served similarly to oatmeal. In some European countries it’s mixed with bread flour. 

A lead breeder with Dryland Genetics, Santosh Rajput, has created some Indian dishes with proso millet.

There’s also research where proso millet has been used as a substitute in feed for animals. 

Patrick Schnable said a University of Nebraska study showed the daily weight gain in feeder pigs fed proso millet didn’t change or they gained so little that it wasn’t significant.

There have also been studies in Europe feeding proso millet to chicken and turkeys.

Some studies have also shown you can use proso millet instead of corn in the production of ethanol, James Schnable said.

“You can grow it in places where you can’t grow corn, but it can replace corn for most of the applications we use corn for,” he said.

“This isn’t going to threaten the corn crop,” Patrick Schnable said. “But it can replace and supplement the demand for carbohydrate in feed.”

James Schnable said proso millet also has a shorter growing season. It can be planted in early to mid-June. It is harvested by the end of August or early September.

“So one way it has the potential to enhance food security is something can go very wrong, you can have a hailstorm, severe drought, your field gets flooded out, and it means that some of these older, cheaper varieties can be planted over what crop failed and still get calories and a crop out of that land that year instead of going to zero,” he said.

The sustainability of proso millet

The Schnables say the benefit of proso millet goes beyond its versatility. They also tout the grain’s ability to be grown in areas of low precipitation and that it requires little to no fertilizer to grow. Converting to planting proso millet also doesn’t require any new equipment, particularly for farmers who grow wheat.

Proso millet is generally grown in rotation with winter wheat, which is planted in the fall and harvested in the spring, “so it fits in very well with farmers who have wheat,” Patrick Schnable said.

As water dries up in aquifers and water rights are sold off in the western Plains, more land will open up that could be used for proso millet production, he said.

James Schnable said there is a large swath of the western Corn Belt where there is growing competition for a limited supply of water. In areas where land had water rights and was used to grow irrigated corn or irrigated cotton, land is opening up that could be used to grow proso millet, he said.

Because it requires less water to grow and increase yields, the proso millet developed by Dryland Genetics also benefits producers, Patrick Schnable said.

“It has this fabulous water story,” he said. “If you feed a laying hen proso millet instead of corn, you save 10 to 20 gallons of water per egg that is produced. And if you feed it to hogs, each 4-ounce pork chop saves about the same amount of water.”

Schnable said if a large food manufacturer shifted its feed to proso millet, it could save a couple of percentage points of the waterflow of the Missouri River.

“So there’s this very strong story about preserving water, and we think that’s going to help drive the adoption of this crop,” he said.

Because it is planted in rotation with winter wheat, there typically is little to no application of nitrogen fertilizer, Schnable said.

“It’s used to scavenge whatever nitrogen was applied to the winter wheat crop that was ahead of it,” he said. “Most producers don’t apply any nitrogen or don’t apply very much.”

Proso millet also doesn’t have any significant pests, so typically fungicides and herbicides aren’t used, Schnable said.

“So all of this, I think, promoting resiliency and sustainability is good for the planet,” he said. 

Driving demand

Part of their work to increase demand for their product is reaching out to those big food manufacturers, showing them that Dryland Genetics proso millet does increase yields.

“Once we accomplish that, the next step is to build out the seed production and this connection with end users that could increase demand,” James Schnable said.

The company brought on a chief commercial officer last fall, and that person has been making contact with companies like Tyson, ConAgra and Pepsi to “tell the story and figure out the steps of how proso millet gets incorporated into feed rations and consumer packaged products,” he said.

Patrick Schnable said even without adding acreage, with the 10% to 40% increase in yields their seed produces, the supply will also increase 10% to 40%.

“So what we’re doing is building demand at the other side so that supply and demand are going to move up in parallel stepwise,” he said.

Connecting the dots to food insecurity

Much of civilization rests on a handful of grains, such as corn, wheat and rice, which make up half of calories consumed globally, said the Schnables, who see proso millet as being a viable option to help fill the gap to help combat food insecurity.

“For example, right now in Ukraine, that is a significant amount of global production coming right off the table, and the impacts of that in terms of hunger and food insecurity are going to be felt around the world,” James Schnable said.

Patrick Schnable said there is a need to produce more crops to spread the risk to protect people from hunger.

And the decrease in availability of water resulting from climate change makes proso millet a more attractive option to fight food insecurity, James Schnable said.

“The loss of access to sufficient fresh water is a bigger problem in the short and medium term in ensuring enough calories to go around the globe than the temperature shift itself,” he said. “So having this crop, you can do more with less, which is typically pretty hard to do.” 

The future

“We think it’s not at all implausible that five or 10 years from now we’re going to see proso millet on 5 million or maybe even 10 million acres,” James Schnable said. “We really think it could grow 10 times and maybe substantially more than that.”

His dad compared the potential of proso millet to what happened to canola, which he said grew similarly over about 10 years.  

“It had to do with coming up with new germplasm, new varieties that were better suited to the market, so that was an important step. And they changed the chemical composition so it was a little better for human digestion, and proso millet doesn’t have those problems,” he said.