Strange Creature wrote:

How is amaranth generally planted, cultivated, and
harvested with farm machinery? Does the grain
generally come off with a wheat combine? How about
planting or threshing? Do the lower stalks generally
come off like wheat straw on a combine or is other
equipment needed? Are there any problems with
mechanised planting, cultivating, or harvesting
that are the basic problems with amaranth production?

AFAIK it's mostly grown here and there, mostly by nonmechanized means by
subsistence farmers. A wheat combine would need major mods--the seeds are
tiny, between poppy seeds and sesame seeds in size. You'd probably want
something with a sort of threshing drum, a fine screen to let the seed
fall away from the trash, and a fairly gentle cyclone separator to sort
seed from fine chaff by relative density.

A combine-type harvester may not be the way to go. The seed ripens
unevenly, so many people find they can close to double the yield by
threshing twice, a couple weeks apart. So cutting, threshing, letting the
plants fall and then windrowing them like hay, perhaps? With a harvester
that can either cut standing plants or pick up a windrow from the ground?
Lower tech, cut them early and shock them, then haul the shocks to a barn
with a tight floor and thresh twice.

With two threshings, several people report yields of up to four tons per
acre, though many of these were small enough test plots that edge effects
might affect the yield.

It's essentially a tropical plant that will put up with the temperate zone
if the frost-free season is long enough--like maize. It doesn't like
drought, and will need irrigation if the warm season is also a dry season,
as it is where I live. Very roughly, it likes the same sorts of
conditions maize does.

Amaranth's advantages are nutritional and versatility. It has slightly
more protein than good whole wheat flour, and almost twice as much as
cornmeal. As for versatility, it is one of the very few plants that's
equally useful as a grain crop and a potherb. In many tropical countries,
it's primarily cultivated as a green leafy veg. It thrives in this role
all the way to the Equator--places like New Guinea, Indonesia and India,
where many northern greens won't grow. "Yield" of course means totally
different standards for grain and potherbs, but it does give the farmer
two marketing options per crop, with only one sort of seed to save or buy.

It's also worth noting that several species of amaranth are cultivated,
and the figures I've been giving are for A. hypochondriacus. A. cruentus,
A. caudatus, and A. edulis are all basically grain types, or mixed-use.
A. tricolor and A. gangeticus are generally just grown for greens. A.
retroflexus is the well-known wild weed. How valid all these "species"
are I'm not sure; they may just be the results of human specialized
breeding, like poodles and Great Danes, or cabbage and broccoli. AFAIK
all will crossbreed with A. retroflexus.




How about markets? Where could a farmer sell
amaranth if he decided to produce it? Do food
additive or animal feed companies generally not
deal with amaranth? Are there amaranth futures
on any stock exchanges?

AFAIK most of the markets are health food specialty niches. Prices are
quite high at retail, though of course how much of this gets to the farmer
is the question. In my experience, by the time any crop is listed on a
futures exchange, the farmers who grow it are working eighty hours a week
for the privilege of being deeply in debt, so it's probably best not to go
there.

The overwhelming majority of amaranth cultivation around the world never
sees any kind of market; it's grown by subsistence and cash-cropping small
farmers for family use. In this role it seems highly valued, but it's not
the sort of situation that gives you world-averaged price statistics like
wheat or soybeans.



Or are there some basic factors like crop yields
or specific requirements for types of soils,
weather conditions, or growing seasons that are
a great down side to trying to grow and use
amaranth en masse?


I wouldn't try to grow them on more than a garden-plot scale on the
American West Coast, unless you were set up to flood-irrigate very cheaply
and easily. Basically, they're tropical crops that do well in the
warm/wet summers of places where the summers are tropical, and they can
ride out the winters as seeds in a building somewhere. Think corn or
soybeans.

Using them as a grain on a very large scale would call for specialized
harvest machinery, or at least new plates, screens and settings on
existing ones. The uneven ripening would probably be an early target for
plant geneticists in this case, as it would cut the handling roughly in
half if the crop could be harvested in one pass.

Of course, any such expansion of production would need a concurrent
expansion of the demand. Otherwise you get your premium specialty grain
crop being sold off for chicken feed (probably literally!) and all you've
done is find a new way for farmers to go broke, which is hardly necessary.

Conrad Hodson