Drought tolerant Teff

University of Nevada research professor Dr. John Cushman talks about drought tolerant Teff. Teff is grown in Idaho, now in Nevada, and it's grown in a lot of different places throughout the western United States. The other attractive thing about teff is that it's this tropical grass. It uses about three times less water than alfalfa would. In Nevada, when we have a dry year, irrigation water allocations that goes to farmers sometimes can be cut. And we have very limited water resources for irrigation. When that happens, instead of growing nothing, the farmers could use teff as a substitute and still grow a crop because it is so much more water use, efficient being a C4 for grass. And it's very palatable and it's a very good substitute for hay. So it would substitute very nicely for something like the other grasses that are grown for pasture hay. Does it have the same nutritional value as alfalfa? I don't know the details of the nutritional profile. We haven't looked at that ourselves. So ranchers will be saying bring on the sun and climate change because we're going to be feeding our cattle lots and lots of teff. Perhaps those are viable substitutes that we're going to be looking at in the future. Yeah, definitely. We're just trying to develop alternative crops that use less water because climate change is really going to be forcing us to do that. The beauty of research.