Amaranth

Amaranth

Scientific name: Amaranthus spp. (grain amaranth) Common name: amaranth (alegría in Mexico, huauhtli in Nahuatl) Family: Amaranthaceae Category: grain / small-seeded pseudocereal

Amaranth is one of the project’s five initial crops. It introduces another small-seeded crop with historical importance as a food crop, and provides a useful comparison with chia (PRD §8.2). Amaranth is native to Mexico (domesticated there; the alegría/huauhtli grain of the Aztecs) — the strongest fit of the five crops for a Mexican context, and it keeps the small-seed manual-processing thread from chia.

⚠️ Status: drafted — a metadata-level literature survey is done (research/amaranth-seeds/report.md). Pages below are drafts grounded in the survey (paper existence/coverage, not numeric claims). All substantive values are Unknown until source notes (S-####) and full-text claims are registered. Do not treat as growing advice.

Why amaranth

Like chia, amaranth has very small seed and real human-scale processing questions (harvest, threshing, seed cleaning). Unlike chia, it is a grain and a C4 pseudocereal — a classic comparison: similar seed size, different biology, dry-down behavior, and end-use (whole grain, popped “alegría”, flour).

Documentation map

This crop follows the standard structure (PRD §12). Topic pages are drafted from templates/crop/:

• index.md · biology.md · climate.md · soil.md · planting.md · irrigation.md · fertilization.md · pests-diseases.md · harvesting.md · processing.md · storage.md · yield.md · economics.md · open-questions.md · sources.md

Key research areas (from the PRD)

• Grain production
• Plant density
• Harvest timing
• Manual harvest / threshing / seed cleaning
• Yield
• Processing (e.g., popping for grain use)

Coverage snapshot (from the sweep)

• Strong literature: biology/genome, germination, planting density, fertilization, drying/storage, nutrition.
• Weak/near-gap: soil/salinity, manual threshing/winnowing/cleaning, small-scale pests/weeds, Mexico-specific home-garden agronomy, popping at small scale.
• The human-scale manual-processing gap mirrors chia — the core work is practical/grower + original experiments.

Suggested reading order

index.md → yield.md → processing.md → open-questions.md