SAINT CLAUDE, Man. – Reynald Gauthier, the self-proclaimed Manitoba millet king, says he has carved out a unique market.
Even though there is good money in growing and selling millet seed, he doesn’t fear a lot of competitors jumping on his bandwagon.
“Nobody wants to grow it,” said Gauthier, as he prepared his 1976 Ford tandem truck for another drive across the Prairies to deliver a load of red proso millet.
“I’ve been all over Sask-atchewan and Alberta this year,” he said.
Gauthier has tapped into a market of drought-suffering farmers in western Saskatchewan and in much of Alberta who want to grow a forage crop that can withstand drought.
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Millet, which thrives in hot weather and needs little moisture, fits the bill for many cattle producers who want to use the crop as silage or for swath grazing, Gauthier said.
Millet needs only 50 millimetres of rain to produce a crop, he said. Summer scorches don’t hurt it.
“When everything else is cooked, millet is still green,” said Gauthier, who sells his millet seed for 40 cents per pound, bagged and delivered.
Millet needs heat for germination and growth. It can’t be seeded until the soil warms in June.
Millet is also grasshopper resistant, Gauthier said. Once the plant reaches the two-leaf stage, fibres begin growing along the plants stem, making grasshoppers uncomfortable.
“They’d rather eat tree bark than millet,” he said.
Alberta Agriculture pasture and forage agronomist Arvid Aasen said droughts make millet a popular topic.
“There’s a lot of interest in it because whenever it gets dry, people start saying it’s drought tolerant,” said Aasen, who works at the Lacombe research centre.
But Aasen said studies in Alberta have shown that millet often yields no better dry matter weights in dry areas than cereal feed crops such as oats and barley.
“The cereals were right up there with the millet,” said Aasen.
In normal years, cereals will produce considerably more than millet.
“If we start getting back to back wet years again you won’t hear any more about millet.”
Gauthier said few producers want to try growing millet for seed because they don’t want to seed in June and they don’t want a late harvest.
Sometimes millet can be combined in September, but wet weather will delay it. November harvests are common. If the crop comes off wet, it must be dried, Gauthier said. That can be expensive.
He said drying a tandem-truckload of millet seed costs him about $900.
If it isn’t dried to less than 12 percent moisture, it becomes “a solid piece of cheese that’s stinking,” said Gauthier, who has ended up with such bin cheese.
He grows nothing but millet for seed on his 600 acre farm, as he has for six years now. He plans to do the same this summer, but also wants to seed 240 acres of rented land to golden German millet – an early-seeded, long season variety.
Golden German, which is a foxtail variety of millet, was found in a test at the Western Beef Development Centre’s Termuende research farm to be a better backgrounding feed for weaned calves than feedlot grains. However, it does not work well as a pasture crop because of its short root system.
Gauthier plans to keep growing only millet and hopes to increase his market by word of mouth between producers. He doesn’t worry that millet’s attraction will fade if the western Prairies start getting normal rainfalls.
“I’ve been growing millet since I started farming,” said Gauthier.
“It always works.”
