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High on Ethiopia’s Amhara plain at an elevation around 8,000 feet, villagers conduct an ancient ritual—harvesting delicate stalks of teff by hand. The wispy crop is among the earliest domesticated grains, grown by farmers in the region more than six thousand years ago, and so prized it was buried in Egyptian pyramids to feed kings in the afterlife. Grown mostly in Ethiopia by six million smallholder farmers, the highly nutritious grain feeds some fifty million people in the drought-stricken, food-insecure Horn of Africa. Though teff is highly drought tolerant, yields are low.

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George Steinmetz
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www.georgesteinmetz.com
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High on Ethiopia’s Amhara plain at an elevation around 8,000 feet, villagers conduct an ancient ritual—harvesting delicate stalks of teff by hand. The wispy crop is among the earliest domesticated grains, grown by farmers in the region more than six thousand years ago, and so prized it was buried in Egyptian pyramids to feed kings in the afterlife. Grown mostly in Ethiopia by six million smallholder farmers, the highly nutritious grain feeds some fifty million people in the drought-stricken, food-insecure Horn of Africa. Though teff is highly drought tolerant, yields are low.

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