Plant · P-687

Foxtail Millet

Setaria italica

Foxtail millet is a fast-growing tufted annual grass whose small round grain is cooked like rice or ground into flour, and whose non-glutinous cultivars suit coeliac diets. In North America the grain mostly ends up as birdseed, but it is also a working livestock feed - fed whole to poultry, cut green or dried into hay for cattle - and the dense shallow root system holds soil against erosion. It needs full sun, matures in as little as sixty days, and tolerates dry ground better than almost any other cereal, though it stops growing if the soil turns waterlogged and it should not be planted next to wheat, which it can pass a damaging mite and virus to.