That’s title of the article written by Heidi Roth that appeared June 16 on the Offrange website. The introductory paragraph reads, “In the Pacific Northwest, a region of the country known for abundant rainfall, decades of droughts and resource battles are forcing farmers to learn about ‘dry farming.’”
Roth explains that the methods involved in dry farming rely on carefully selecting sites with deep, water-retentive soil and enhancing these conditions through practices like adding organic matter and precise soil preparation. Key to its success is planting at optimal times when soil moisture is present, often with lower plant density to reduce competition for water. In this article she targeted Oregon, an area with which I am somewhat familiar.
In September 2008, I flew to Bend, OR, to join my son Will, who was attending an environmental conference there. Bend is centrally situated in that state, with an altitude of approximately 3,600 feet. Halfway between Bend and the Pacific Ocean lies the Cascade Mountain Range, roughly double that city’s altitude.
While there’s plenty of rainfall between the Cascades and the Pacific, that mountain range causes a rain shadow to the east: Bend’s annual precipitation bounces between 10 and 15 inches, thus earning it the climatological description of “semi-arid.”
Traveling east from Bend, we gained another 1,500 – 2,000 feet of altitude. The main forms of agriculture were cow/calf beef operations and alfalfa. The growing season was too short for corn. A 65- to 70-day crop like Japanese millet has decent chances there. In semi-arid regions, most crops get watered by deep-well pivot irrigation.
Turn the clock back a half century to my county agricultural agent days. In the “Cornell Recommendations for Field Crops” manual was a section titled “Emergency Crops.” Several species were listed, but I only recall Japanese millet. The text stressed that corn planted for silage up till July 15 would still yield the most forage dry matter per acre. We had grown that millet several times on our hillside farm in the Catskills. Our farm’s average altitude was about 2,500 feet, pretty well ruling out corn in any form. Millet, a 65-day crop, performed quite well.
This crop still shows potential in many regions of the Northeast in a strange growing year like 2025, where weather has seriously retarded management staples, like planting corn and making first cutting hay. I recommend that growers expecting forages to be quite limited this year – due to nature’s quirkiness – consider planting this classic emergency crop. A good place to plant millet would be on run-out meadows being considered for seeding back or putting corn on next year.
Millets (there’s more than just Japanese) belong to a special “club.” Other members include corn, sorghum, sudangrass, their hybrids and sugarcane. During photosynthesis, most plants create compounds using three-carbon modules – C-3s. Because these six crops perform their carbon-structuring functions using four-carbon modules, botanists collectively call them C-4s.
The C-4 trait is very beneficial, particularly where too much heat combines with too little moisture. In order for plants to gather carbon atoms from air, C-4s open up their stomas (microscopic openings on leaves). Thus manipulated, stomas limit moisture loss and retain acquired carbon. They perform these tasks more efficiently than C-3s.
Here’s how the C-4s rank in terms of moisture retention “skills” – millets, sorghums, sudangrasses, sugarcane and, lastly, corn.
Here’s some background on Japanese millet: Millets can be grown on soils less than six inches deep. They don’t require rich soils. Millet relies very little on synthetic fertilizers.
When the precipitation pendulum swings the other way, millets fare quite well with moisture surpluses. For example, Japanese millet can be grown in wetlands, depending on the region. It doesn’t grow well in sandy soils but can grow well in flooded soils with standing water, provided that part of the plant remains above the water’s surface. Japanese millet has limited frost tolerance but can be grown at low and medium altitudes.
The most common millet grown in the Northeast is Japanese, which has coarse leaves and grows up to five feet tall, depending on moisture availability and soil fertility. The seed head is four to eight inches long and dark purple in color, with no awns. Seeds may be drilled no deeper than one inch, or broadcast. The recommended drilling rate is 30 lbs./acre. Some farmers plug every other drop hole in their grain drills, allowing them to successfully halve that planting rate.
When broadcasting millet seed, increase the per acre seeding rate to 25 – 30 lbs. After millet heads out, harvest it for forage: it’s already done creating roughage dry matter. In the Northeast, millet seldom dries down enough to combine successfully. At most locations in our region, millet can be planted in mid-July and should be ready, as forage, by the first day of autumn.
Another plus for millet – should crop people decide to graze aftermath – is that there’s no prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide). For grass-fed, certified organic farmers, I recommend they mechanically harvest the stand as soon as one of those dark purplish heads appears. If one red-winged blackbird is seen dining on a millet head, that stand may have already advanced past the stage of grass-fed, grain-free organic approval.
When the millet is mature for forage or fatally frosted – whichever comes first after harvesting this summer annual – immediately plant a blend of oats and a winter forage like rye, triticale, wheat or speltz. Growers should be able to harvest that crop as forage by late October.
It’s best to leave a stubble at least four inches tall to optimize regrowth. The oats winter kill, but the winter forage will survive, perking to life sometime the following March.
