Piles of teff recently harvested being collectively stacked and winnowed at 8,000 ft. on the Amhara Plateau. Teff is believed to be the first domesticated grain and is still the staple food in Ethiopia and Eritrea. It looks like long fine-stemmed grass, with very small seeds about the size of a grain of sand, and is extremely drought tolerant. There is an uncountable number of varieties of teff, which have developed over millennia to successfully feed people on the Ethiopian Highlands, one of the most geographically diverse landscapes in Africa. These fields contain red and yellow colored teff varieties, plus some (green) plots of lentils.
Some 90% of Ethiopia's 110 million people are small-scale agriculturalists, with scarcely any cash crop for income or access to electricity and plumbing.
