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Panicum miliaceum
Also called Broomcorn millet, Common Millet, Chinese Millet, French Millet, Broomcorn, Brown Millet, Hog Millet
Proso millet is a fast-growing annual cereal grass grown mainly for its small seeds, which are used as grain. It is very drought tolerant and can mature in as little as 60 days from planting.
Panicum miliaceum is a grain crop with many common names, including proso millet, broomcorn millet, common millet, hog millet, Kashfi millet, red millet, and white millet. Archaeobotanical evidence suggests millet was first domesticated about 10,000 BP in Northern China. Major cultivated areas include Northern China, Himachal Pradesh of India, Nepal, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Middle East, Turkey, Romania, and the Great Plains states of the United States. About 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares) are grown each year. The crop is notable both for its extremely short lifecycle, with some varieties producing grain only 60 days after planting, and its low water requirements, producing grain more efficiently per unit of moisture than any other grain species tested.
Weedy forms of proso millet are found throughout central Asia, covering a widespread area from the Caspian Sea east to Xinjiang and Mongolia. These may represent the wild progenitor of proso millet or feral escapes from domesticated production. Indeed, in the United States, weedy proso millet, representing feral escapes from cultivation, are now common, suggesting current proso millet cultivars retain the potential to revert, similar to the pattern seen for weedy rice. Currently, the earliest archeological evidence for domesticated proso millet comes from the Cishan site in semiarid north east China around 8,000 BCE. Because early varieties of proso millet had such a short lifecycle, as little as 45 days from planting to harvest, they are thought to have made it possible for seminomadic tribes to first adopt agriculture, forming a bridge between hunter-gatherer-focused lifestyles and early agricultural civilizations.
Witchgrass · Fall panicgrass · Mexican panicgrass · Megathyrsus maximus · Little millet · Switchgrass · Panicgrass
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Proso millet by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
