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By SCOTT CANON | Kansas City Star

NICODEMUS — A new “it” grain is blooming in the fields of northwestern Kansas. Teff has a ready-made market of Ethiopian expatriates hungering for a taste of home with virtually no supply of the grain for their beloved injera bread. Teff packs more protein per pound than wheat. And because it produces gluten-free flour, it could open a buffet line of breads and pastas to people with celiac disease.

It also can withstand drought and floods and, so far, it hasn’t fallen prey to pests that bedevil other Midwestern crops.

Ethiopians have long adored the grain, raising it by hand in their highlands and making it the country’s staple cereal.

“People will definitely buy it,” said 52-year-old Gillan Alexander, a Graham County farmer who is among those experimenting with a crop that is ancient in Africa but new to Kansas.

But can America reap its harvest?

A tiny grain

A grain of teff is only slightly larger than the period at the end of this sentence. Walk through a field that Gary Alexander — a cousin of Gillan’s — has planted in wheat, and all the challenges of mechanizing teff production begin to show.

Start with the ground. Squint closely enough and you see that some of the tiny reddish seeds have fallen to the dirt, lost for any chance of harvest. In fact, the word “teff” translates to “loss” in the Ethiopian language of Amarigna.

The grass has begun to shed its seeds partly because the plants have matured at dramatically different rates. Some are bright green shoots just starting out, while others are browning in retreat.

No sooner does it reach maturity than the soft stem bends over. Modern farmers call it lodging, and they don’t like it. They prefer crops with good posture that stand up for vacuum-like harvest machinery.

Teff has proved all the more troublesome because even at full growth, it can vary in height by a foot or more. When teff is harvested, far too much chaff ends up with the Lilliputian grain.

“You can tell how the Ethiopians get the seed by whacking at this stuff by hand,” 62-year-old Gary Alexander said. “I don’t think my hands will last that long.”

He has pieced together two-by-fours and window screen to devise a sieve, and it works well enough. So it’s possible, but not yet practical, to harvest teff commercially.

Efficiency lacking

Ethiopian farming of teff only supports a national per capita income of $800 a year. To make the payments on Kansas farmland, to cover the cost of 21st-century farm equipment and to leave a little profit at the end will require something more efficient.

“So far, it’s been too labor-intensive,” said Josh Coltrain of Cloud County Community College.

Coltrain has been hired by the Kansas Black Farmers Association to oversee a project paid for by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to determine whether teff has potential in America’s breadbasket.

Just a few hundred acres have been planted so far, scattered among several farmers in an area where one person sometimes tends more than 1,000 acres. Grants issued through the Solomon Valley Resource Conservation Development Area since the test plots were first planted in 2005 add up to less than $200,000.

The grain’s promise, Coltrain said, doesn’t come in its yields. Farmers can get perhaps three times as many bushels per acre from wheat. But the premium paid for teff — at a few health food stores and groceries that cater to African immigrants and to Ethiopian restaurants — could quickly make up for the smaller bounty.

“I get calls all the time from people wanting to buy it from us, mainly for Ethiopian restaurants and bakeries,” he said. “I have to tell them we haven’t got everything figured out yet.”

Coltrain thinks it ultimately will be a good Great Plains crop. It can withstand wild weather springs, and in many ways the dry spells common to western Kansas are similar to those in Ethiopia. The trick, he said, will be cross-breeding varieties that bring more uniformity to the plants and increase the amount of grain a teff plant produces.

‘Cotton candy for horses’

Teff’s cultivation dates at least to the 13th century B.C., and the grain today hasn’t changed much. By comparison, wheat, grain sorghum, corn and the other grains popular in this part of the world are finely tuned, sometimes genetically modified hybrids.

In the meantime, farmers and agricultural economists say teff looks worthwhile as a forage crop — cut for hay without bothering to harvest the seed.

“That’s a decent fallback,” said Bruce Anderson, a professor of agronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Teff tends to grow quickly enough to cut up to four times in a year and pack into bales. And for Kansas fields planted in fall for winter wheat, plant scientists said it makes a good rotation crop.

What’s more, the softer leaves and stems make it ideal for pampered livestock such as alpacas or llamas that sometimes have difficulty digesting hay, or end up with bloody snouts from eating rougher products.

“I call it cotton candy for horses,” Gary Alexander said. “They just love it.”

The push to bring the grain to Kansas began with Edgar Hicks, an official at the Nebraska State Grange who works with minority farmers. He hopes Nicodemus will be to American teff what the Champagne region of France is to sparkling wine.

Egyptian border guards shot and wounded a refugee from Ethiopia as he tried to cross illegally into Israel, police said Saturday.

The 20-year-old was trying to cross the border with a group of other migrants from several African countries when [the blood thirsty] border guards ordered them to stop. When the group failed to do so, police said, a border guard shot the Ethiopian man in the foot.

The man was taken to hospital in al-Arish, on Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip.

The rest of the Ethiopian’s party escaped into the Sinai desert, police said, adding that the wounded man had told them that he and the others in his group had paid $1,000 each to smugglers in exchange for help crossing the border into Israel.

Residents of towns near Egypt’s border with Israel, which stretches along 250 kilometers of desert, said they had noticed tighter security and heavier police presence along the border in recent days.

The shootings on the border have repeatedly drawn condemnation from international human rights groups.

“Attempted border crossings are not a capital offense,” said Joe Stork, associate Mideast director at the New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch, after border guards killed four migrants on the border on September 9.

The London-based watchdog Amnesty International says nearly 40 migrants have been killed trying to cross into Israel from Egypt since 2008. Israeli groups say thousands more have succeeded in crossing illegally.

(UAI News) — A large adoption agency in the Netherlands, Wereldkinderen, has temporarily stopped adoptions from Ethiopia as a result recent reports about abuse of the system by the government in Ethiopia and local adoption agencies.

Research done by the adoption agency, shows that the information about the children on file does not match with their actual back ground. In several cases the mothers of the children were still alive, while being listed as deceased.

Last month Wereldkinderen’s executive director Ina Hut, resigned because of intimidation by the Dutch Ministry of Justice in relation to corrupt adoption practices in China.

Euradopt partner Wereldkinderen was alerted of this news and started their own investigation, a task which the Dutch government should have done as member of the Hague Treaty for Adoption.

The Dutch government said it has nothing to do with this situation. At least not before Wereldkinderen finalised their investigation regarding the adoptions from Ethiopia. This is a remarkable comment from the Dutch authorities since they prohibited the proposal for investigation in China recently, which is one of the reasons why former director of this agency decided to resign. It might be, that the interest for trade and diplomatic relationships with Ethiopia is less important for the Dutch government as with China.

This weekend 3-5 couples where preparing to depart to Ethiopia but have been informed not to go.

By Don Cayo | The Vancouver Sun

The theory is simple: If you provide easier access to water, the scarce and essential resource that demands so much of women’s time in a dry country like Ethiopia, you loosen the bonds of drudgery that hold them down.

It doesn’t always work out quite that simply, or that quickly, as is made plainin a two-page Vancouver Sun story by Joshua Hergesheimer. He looks unblinkingly at the challenge that remains — affecting meaningful social change, despite a Canadian NGO’s great success in bringing clean, accessible water to villages whose women’s lives have been defined by the need to fetch and carry, and whose children have often died from water-borne disease.

Hergesheimer’s story, accessible here and well worth the read, interests me for another reason, too. He traveled to Ethiopia and wrote the story on a scholarship grant available to students of the Langara College journalism program in Vancouver.

Aside from its principle funder, the Canadian International Development Agency, this grant program has nothing to do with the Seeing the World Through New Eyes fellowship program for young working journalists that I help to run. But it does share a common goal — exposing young Canadian writers to the gripping issues of mass poverty around the world, and bringing home compelling stories for Canadian readers.

At a time when newsroom resources in Canada are stretched thin and travel budgets have shrivelled, I think this kind of program takes on even more importance than in past. So I’m delighted to see Langara take on the challenge of providing this kind of opportunity to its students, and delighted that Hergesheimer was able to use it so well.

To link to some posts and columns on the Jack Webster Foundation fellowship I work with and our pending trip to Africa, and to some of the stories done by the young working journalists on our last trip to Latin America, click here.