Amaranth — Open questions

⚠️ Core project principle: “Unknown” is preferable to fabricated certainty (§6.2). This is the living list of what we do not yet know. Each question can become an original experiment (docs/methodology/experiments.md).

Open questions (all unanswered today for grain amaranth)

1. Photoperiod × cultivar: do grain-amaranth accessions flower and mature reliably at temperate home-garden daylengths, and how does this vary by species (A. hypochondriacus vs A. cruentus)? (Conflicting/Unknown in the sweep.)
2. Manual threshing/cleaning: how long and at what loss can a few kg of dry amaranth panicles be hand-threshed, winnowed, and cleaned? Candidate EX (see processing.md). Needs experiment.
3. Hand-pop (“alegría”): the simplest small-scale method to pop amaranth grain, and how it affects digestibility/anti-nutrients at home scale. Needs experiment.
4. Home-garden yield: realistic clean-grain yield per m² after manual threshing losses, for a small plot. Needs experiment.
5. Shatter management: how much seed is lost to shattering if harvest is delayed, and the practical harvest window.
6. Small-scale pests/birds/weeds: real bird pressure on panicles and weed/damping-off management at 20 m² (academic coverage weak).
7. Home seed storage: viability of stored amaranth seed over time for resowing at room temperature.
8. Mexico-specific management: confirmed alegría growing practice in Mexican highland/semi-arid smallholder systems (sweep is thin; needs extension/Spanish/grower sources).

Candidate experiments (ordered by value for the human-scale case)

• E1: Hand-thresh-and-clean benchmark (time + loss per kg).
• E2: Hand-pop trial (“alegría”) at home scale.
• E3: Small-plot grain-yield trial (one question: density or sowing date; record per experiments/).

How a question is retired

A question leaves this list when it gains a tagged answer in the topic page (source S-#### or experiment EX-####) and, where appropriate, a value in data/crops/amaranth.yaml.

Confirmed gaps from the 2026-08 literature sweep

Findings from the rforge metadata sweep (research/amaranth-seeds/report.md) — not yet researched further; the sweep tells us where evidence lives or is missing:

1. Manual postharvest processing is a real gap. The academic set is nearly silent on hand-scale threshing/winnowing/cleaning of amaranth. Ripeness for practical/grower sources (U) and original experiments (E) to carry the core human-scale knowledge — exactly as for chia.
2. Field vs home scale. Papers report kg/ha and plants/m²; translating to small plots (beds, hand-watering) is an open question per docs/methodology/units.md.
3. Mexico genepool under-represented in this sweep — amaranth is native to Mexico; extension/Spanish-language/grower sources will be essential there.
4. Density/yield conflict expected. Amaranth yield is strongly density-, date-, and cultivar-dependent; preserve disagreement rather than average (see yield.md).
5. Small-scale pests/weeds/birds — weak coverage in the recovered set.