As a child, Senegalese-born chef Pierre Thiam took trips from Dakar to the countryside to visit his grandparents. There, he often ate fonio, a locally grown seeded grass rarely found outside rural areas. After making a name for himself at New York restaurants decades later, Thiam’s thoughts returned to the ingredient. “It’s very versatile,” he says. “It’s a delicate grain,” mild and nutty with a fluffy texture that resembles couscous.

But he couldn’t find it anywhere, so he began importing it through his food supply company, Yolélé. It wasn’t just fonio’s texture that he saw as a boon for the US market: The grain has attributes that make it especially enticing in a warming world.

Fonio, grown predominantly in West Africa, is a staple in many African and Asian countries. Part of the millet family, it is fast-growing, highly nutritious, resilient to changing conditions, and able to thrive in poor, arid soils.

Few farmers grow millets these days, despite the need for adaptable crops.

Like corn, sorghum, and sugarcane, it is a C4 plant, which, to spare you a long lesson in cellular biology, means it retains water more efficiently than most plants, especially in sunny environments. Millets have among the lowest water requirements of any cereal crop for another reason, too: Their elongated and dense root systems can access moisture deep in the soil, reducing reliance on regular rainfall.

But few farmers grow millets these days, despite the need for adaptable crops. Nearly every region of the world is getting hotter. Twenty-one of the world’s 37 major aquifers—including many in the United States—are being depleted faster than they can be replenished, and major rivers are drying up due to prolonged drought. Research published in Nature Climate Change in 2021 showed that human-­caused warming has already reduced global agricultural production by 21 percent since 1961. And a new report by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water warns that half the world’s food production is in areas at risk of serious water shortages by the middle of the century.

If millets are such an attractive choice for our changing climate, why aren’t we growing more of them? Commercialization, it turns out, faces several roadblocks. “It’s relatively difficult to process them,” explains Jonathon Landeck, co-founder of the nonprofit North American Millets Alliance. The seeds are typically sifted for impurities, cleaned, and dried before being dehulled—a task traditionally accomplished by hand with a mortar and pestle—and sorted by size and color. These are tedious tasks, and there isn’t much to be had in the way of efficient, millet-specific processing equipment.

In 2022, a Malian agro-processing venture involving Yolélé and another firm received a $2 million grant from the US Agency for ­International Development to develop a transparent supply chain and better technology. The partnership has collaborated with the Swiss equipment manufacturer Bühler to engineer a machine that virtually eliminates fonio loss during processing—previously as much as half the crop—increasing its output of edible grain from 1 ton per workday to 3 tons per hour.

But markets require demand. Few American consumers are familiar with millet, let alone know how to prepare it, Landeck says. While the UN declared 2023 the International Year of Millets, government funding for research and crop subsidies on anywhere near the scale of those enjoyed by corn, wheat, and rice growers “is yet to follow,” says chemist Amrita Hazra, a co-founder of the Millet Project, a research collective based at the University of California, Berkeley. The USDA maintains a collection of millet seeds from around the globe, Hazra adds, and should invest in research to determine which species grow best in different climates and altitudes, knowledge that could incentivize farmers to propagate millets.

The agency is, in fact, funding a small-scale exploration of millet as an economically viable US crop. Earlier this year, it granted $4 million to Zego, a company that aims to increase domestic processing capacity, marketing, and consumption of organic millet.

Thiam would be excited if Americans fell in love with fonio, though he’d rather we continue sourcing it from West African farmers who are often overlooked by the global supply chain and have been growing this climate-resilient grain for millennia. Meanwhile, he says, “creating a market for fonio would not only allow this crop to not disappear, it would also create a model for other crops out there that are just waiting to have their potential unlocked.”