Chia — Open Questions

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

Open questions (all currently unanswered for chia)

1. Photoperiod sensitivity: Do common cultivars flower under the day-lengths of mid-latitude home gardens, or do they need short-day conditions? (Conflicting reports in literature need resolving.)
2. Human-scale yield: What clean seed yield (g/m²) does a well-run small plot actually produce after manual threshing and cleaning losses?
3. Manual threshing: What is the time and loss for hand-threshing dry chia? Candidate experiment EX (see processing.md).
4. Seed cleaning: Can tiny chia seeds be separated from chaff and fine material with simple screens/winnowing, or is specialized equipment needed?
5. Seed viability of food-grade seed: Will commercial food chia reliably germinate for planting, and for how long?
6. Water requirement: What is the total seasonal water need on a small plot under local conditions?
7. Bird/rodent pressure: How much netting or protection is realistically needed at small scale?
8. Storage stability: Suitability of home storage at room temperature given chia’s high oil content.

Candidate experiments (ranked by value to the human-scale case)

• E1: Germination test of food-grade seed (quick).
• E2: Small-plot yield trial (one question: density or irrigation; record per experiments/).
• E3: Hand-threshing time & loss benchmark.

How to retire a question

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

Gaps confirmed by the 2026-08 literature sweep

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

1. Manual processing is a genuine gap. Academic literature contains essentially nothing on human-scale harvest, threshing, winnowing, and cleaning of chia. This strengthens the case that practical/grower sources (U) and original experiments (E) will supply the core human-scale knowledge.
2. Field-scale vs home-scale. Papers report plants/m² and kg/ha. Whether those translate to small plots (beds, buckets, hand watering) is an open question — expect scale-conversion issues per docs/methodology/units.md.
3. Storage at home conditions. Drying kinetics and oil-stability papers exist; long-term room-temperature storage of home quantities is under-covered. Unknown/Needs experiment.
4. Regional bias. Yield/density studies cluster in Argentina, Chile, Egypt, India, Morocco, Kenya; temperate home-garden regions are underserved by the literature.
5. Pests/birds/weeds at small scale — very weak coverage in the retrieved set.