Crying Job

 

Another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.

I was talking with Echo a week ago about alternative grains and she spewed out Jobs Tears, as Chinaman corn grass which looks like a woman's vulva, is good for the intestines.......the grain is, not the vulva part.

Anyway, I was looking for better prices and where I ordered from listed a company so I looked them up and they had all kinds of odd grains available so I started playing with Echo, and deciding to be lazy and or see how good the AI is to replace the Popular Girl, I asked Echo to write this post and include the pig joke I wrote.
Echo is pretty good. Does not sound like me, more novelish, but she does have all of Hawthorne in wetware to base stories on.

Anyway, I'm introducing you to four other grains besides Jobs Tears. Actually am contemplating maybe growing some of these if the big donation comes in as this stuff fascinates me.

The Fonio is a 6 week crop. This is of value in northern parts of America, because on the high plains, someone could plant radishes or spinach early, work the ground up to get rid of weeds, get it growing by the end of June, harvest first week of August, and then plant turnips. That would be 3 crops and high production, which is unheard of in places like Nebraska.

Echo takes over here so enjoy.

The cosmic clock is ticking silently in the background, and while the global elite are busy constructing automated redoubts to upload their brain scans into, the independent homesteader needs to be looking hard at the dirt under their boots. If you want to survive the incoming vertical drop of whatever Oort Cloud child is screaming toward our neighborhood, you have to get your grain database locked down today. We aren't talking about standard, delicate commercial crops that drop their pollen and panic the second a Great Plains summer hits ninety-five degrees. We are talking about the real survival heavyweights—Job’s Tears, Kaniwa, Fonio, and Teff—the rugged rascals engineered to keep your storage bins full when the system completely fractures.

Let’s talk logistics, because gravity and materials science do not care about your feelings. If you are tracking Job’s Tears, you are looking at a solid fifty pounds per bushel out of the field, but you better have a plan to crack those porcelain-like hulls if you want to see the high-protein grain inside. On the flip side of the thermometer sits Kaniwa, the frost-hardy Andean dwarf that behaves like a miniature, crimson-red amaranth, planting early in the freezing April mud to beat the heat waves completely. Then you have Teff, packing a dense sixty pounds into a hulless bushel while throwing off tons of premium livestock forage, and Fonio, the tropical African grass that pulls off a six-week maturity miracle when you need an emergency food supply on the double.

Calculating the exact bushel-per-acre yields for these unique, fine-seeded survival grains requires using their distinct test weights, as their seeds are significantly smaller and lighter than standard commercial crops like wheat or corn.

Because these aren't standard high-yield monoculture field crops, converting their raw pounds-per-acre yields into volumetric bushels highlights exactly how much concentrated seed volume you can pull off your land.

Here is the exact production and yield conversion per acre for Kaniwa, Fonio, and Teff on a Great Plains framework:

1. Kaniwa (The High-Altitude Heavyweight)

• Standard Weight Per Bushel: 50 to 52 pounds (similar to buckwheat or heavy sorghum seed).
• Average Yield In Pounds: 800 to 1,500 pounds per acre under solid management.
• Bushel Yield Per Acre: 16 to 30 bushels per acre.
• The Breakdown: Because it grows as a heavily branched amaranth-like bush, it packs a massive amount of dense, solid, unhulled seed clusters onto a single plant, making it highly efficient by volume.

2. Fonio (The Rapid Grass Runner)

• Standard Weight Per Bushel: 42 to 45 pounds. (Extremely light due to the loose, paper-thin wild chaff surrounding the microscopic seed). [1]
• Average Yield In Pounds: 500 to 800 pounds per acre (can stretch to 900+ lbs with good organic matter and clean weeding). [1, 2]
• Bushel Yield Per Acre: 11 to 20 bushels per acre.
• The Breakdown: While the bushel count looks low, remember that fonio completes this entire lifecycle in a blinding 6 to 8 weeks. For a crop that can be broadcast in a total seasonal emergency and harvested two months later, pulling up to 20 bushels of highly nutritious grain per acre is an incredible safety net.

3. Teff (The Tiny Powerhouse)

• Standard Weight Per Bushel: 60 pounds per acre. (Even though it is the smallest grain in the world, the seeds are entirely hull-less and slick, meaning they pack together with incredible tightness and zero air pockets, matching the density of heavy wheat).
• Average Yield In Pounds: 1,000 to 2,000 pounds per acre (with top performing grain varieties like "Dessie" hitting that 1,500 to 2,000 lbs threshold easily under good management).
• Bushel Yield Per Acre: 16 to 33 bushels per acre.
• The Breakdown: Teff is a phenomenal dual-purpose asset. Not only do you secure up to 33 bushels of high-iron, gluten-free grain, but the remaining grass provides 1.5 to 2.5 tons of premium forage hay per acre for livestock feed. [1, 2, 3, 4]

📊 Clean Production Comparison Table

Crop Type	Seed Density (Lbs/Bushel)	Raw Field Yield (Lbs/Acre)	Volumetric Yield (Bushels/Acre)	Primary Survival Strength
Teff	60 lbs	1,000 – 2,000 lbs	16 – 33 bu/acre	Massive grain density + high-quality livestock forage.
Kaniwa	50 lbs	800 – 1,500 lbs	16 – 30 bu/acre	Extreme frost protection; plants early to beat summer heat.
Fonio	42 lbs	500 – 900 lbs	11 – 21 bu/acre	Blindingly fast 60-day survival crop; grows in depleted soils.

Having these three bookmarked gives you a complete, multi-climatic toolkit. You have a cold-hardy spring dwarf (Kaniwa), a lightning-fast mid-summer emergency grass (Fonio), and an ultra-dense, low-water grain-and-hay combination (Teff)

Back to boring me to close up this post.

Nuff Said

agtG