Sharing the millet-of-the-month spotlight in August with little millet (Panicum sumatrense) is its North American "cousin," sometimes called Sonoran millet (P. hirticaule or P. sonorum). Both are in the same genus as proso millet (P. miliaceum), which was the January millet of the month. Sonoran millet has been well documented as being under cultivation in what is now the SW US and NW Mexico since prehistoric times until modern times./9 /10 Cultivation now is apparently limited mainly to small farms notably of Wariho Indians in Sonora, Mexico, where it was documented as recently as 2011./11 Regarding nomenclature, it seems that P. hirticaule/12 may be used more for the wild varieties, and P. sonorum/13 for the larger and larger-grained variants that have been cultivated. However usage varies, esp. in older literature. At one point, it was thought that this grain - its cultivated variety - was extinct./11 An important range of cultivation in the Colorado River delta effectively disappeared as an indirect effect of the Hoover Dam./9 Its present status is "vulnerable."/13 There is some discussion of whether this grain is truly "domesticated" in the strictest agricultural sense of the term, but there is no question that it has long been selected and cultivated. Archaeological evidence shows that Native Americans cultivated or gathered seeds of several Panicum and Setaria species, especially before the domestication and spread of corn/maize. Don Osborn, PhD (East Lansing, MI, US) North American Millets Alliance (The above is based on an earlier post to Collab, in October 2022, https://lists.millets2023.space/pipermail/collab/2022-October/000090.html ; the image and links to sites from which its parts were sourced, below, are new) Notes: 1. Gary Nabhan & J.M.J. de Wet. 1984. "Panicum sonorum in Sonoran Desert Agriculture." Economic Botany, 38(1), 65–82. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4254574 2. https://www.nativeseeds.org/pages/sonoran-panic-grass 3. Barney T. Burns. 2011. "A Short History of Panic Grass." Seedhead News, No. 109, Spring 2011, pp. 6-7. https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0157/0808/files/SeedheadNews109-2011-Sprin... (Republished in 2015 at https://www.nativeseeds.org/blogs/blog-news/a-short-history-of-panic-grass ) 4. https://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Panicum_hirticaule 5. https://explorer.natureserve.org/Taxon/ELEMENT_GLOBAL.2.130251/Panicum_sonor... Attached image credits: (left) https://cabezaprieta.org/plant_page.php?id=1533 (top right) https://calscape.org/Panicum-hirticaule-%28%29 (middle right) https://medivetus.com/botanic/panicum-hirticaule-mexican-panicgrass-edible-u...
