2023 declared International Year of Millets Canada

Jan 04, 2023

The FAO will spend the year raising awareness about the crop and promote sustainable production

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

Millets will have time in the international spotlight in 2023.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) declared this year as the International Year of Millets.

“Millets can grow on arid lands with minimal inputs and are resilient to changes in climate,” the FAO’s website says. “They are therefore an ideal solution for countries to increase self-sufficiency and reduce reliance on imported cereal grains.”

Millets can be used as livestock feed, to make alcohol, bread, beer, cereal and other items.

In Canada, millets are usually grown in Ontario and in Western Canada.

Proso millet arrived in Canada in the 17^th century and was used as a forage crop in the early 1900s.

In June 2015, the B.C. government suggested millet as an alternative forage crop when irrigation water is limited, saying the crop has a high drought tolerance, a low-medium water use and high yield potential.

In Ontario, OMAFRA lists pearl millet as a potential cover crop.

One of its benefits is related to pest management.

“Research shows that a pearl millet cover crop (using CFPM101 developed at the Delhi AAFC Research Station) is an effective way to reduce root lesion nematodes provided it is weed free,” OMAFRA says.

India produces the most millet of any country.

In 2022, Indian farmers produced 12 million metric tons of millet, which represented about 39 percent of global millet.

The countries of Niger, China, Nigeria and Mali also produce significant amounts of millet.

The FAO has dedicated a calendar year to the promotion of a food product since 2004 – the International Year of Rice.

The FAO decided in March 2021 that millets would be the focus of 2023.

Farmers interested in growing millet can learn about successful practices from this 2021 Small Farm Canada article.

Growers can also follow the International Year of Millets on social media using the hashtag #IYM2023.

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids