About a century ago, the Swedish-American botanist Peter Jansen Wester,/1 who was many years in the Philippines with the USDA, promoted Job's Tears (Coix lacryma-jobi)/2 as a food crop with great potential. He used the Cebuano (or possibly Tagalog) name "adlay" in his writing, and that term is widely used today. Like other grain crops, adlay has significant genetic variation. One major distinction is between varieties where the seed is enclosed in a soft shell, which facilitate dehulling and use as food, and those with a hard shell, which sometimes find use as beads in crafts. Another variation is in height with some being short, and others, such as in the photo on page 222 of Wester's 1922 article on adlay,/3 which grow taller than the average person. Adlay was grown in various localities in Asia ages before Wester's efforts to bring this food crop to wider attention. While it did not achieve widespread adoption after Wester's promotion of it, adlay is currently grown commercially in several parts of Asia, and is packaged for export to retailers, including in the US and Canada. (Sometimes it is labelled as "Chinese pearl barley," altho it is not closely related to barley.) It is not, to our knowledge, grown as a food crop anywhere in North America. Adlay has cultural roots where it has long been cultivated. For example, in Arunachala Pradesh, India, it is promoted as a traditional crop among the Adi people./4 And adlay features in Chinese traditional medicine, being considered to have a mild diuretic effect. There has been some intriguing research on culinary uses of adlay and on health effects of compounds in this grain, and there is a need for further work in these areas. Adlay, or Job's tears, is NAMA's millet of the month in December. Notes: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Jansen_Wester 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adlay 3. Wester, P.J. (1922) "Adlay — A New Grain Plant From the Orient: A Relative of Indian Corn Found in Eastern Asia in a Great Number of Varietal Forms — Offering an Untouched Field of Work for the Plant Breeder." Journal of Heredity, Vol. 13, Issue 5, May 1922, pp. 221–227, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.jhered.a102209 (full text here - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/The_journal_of_heredity_... - search "adlay") 4. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cropsecure-agritech-private-limited-company_a... Don Osborn, PhD (East Lansing, MI, US) North American Millets Alliance