Two species in the genus Brachiaria or Urochloa share the spotlight as "millet of the month" in September again this year: browntop or brown top millet (B. ramosa), grown for food in India, and for wildlife in the southeast US, and Guinea millet (B. deflexa), cultivated in northern Futa Jalon, Guinea, where it is locally considered a kind of fonio. The latter is an ethnobotanical connection, if you will, between a Digitaria (D. exilis), that is formally and more widely known as "fonio," and this particular Brachiaria (B, deflexa), that is called wild fonio in the main language of Futa Jalon, Pular (literally "fonio of the animals" - some West African languages use such references to designate plants that resemble the main useful plants that are cultivated or managed). I'm not aware of any ethnobotanical connection between browntop and any Digitaria, I was interested to see mention of revival of browntop millet cultivation in Karnataka, India in a discussion of potential revival of cultivation of sikiya millet (D. sanguinalis) in another part of the country. (The article also mentions in passing, raishan, D. compacta): "Can Baiga millet be part of mainstream?" by Deepanwita Gita Niyogi, Down to Earth, 13 Jun 2018 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/food/can-baiga-millet-be-part-of-mainstream--... In looking for more information on this revival of browntop, I found a good discussion at: "Return of the forgotten crop – Brown top millet," by Anitha Reddy and Krishna Prasad G., Leisa India, (n.d.) https://www.leisaindia.org/return-of-the-forgotten-crop-brown-top-millet/ Apparently farmers returned to cultivating this millet when drought impacted the availability of water for irrigating cereal crops. The article mentions that while it is easy to plant browntop, the processing of its very small grains with their hard hulls presents a bottleneck - even machines used to process slightly larger small (or minor) millets are not ideal. This calls to mind the challenges facing processing of fonio, which are being successfully addressed. Browntop can grow in places that might get flooding - this I think is pretty well known - but a new thing I learned from the latter article is that it is apparently shade tolerant. Is browntop millet the only shade-tolerant of the millets? Don Don Osborn, PhD (East Lansing, MI, US) North American Millets Alliance - co-founder