job's tears questions

Hi folks,

Recently dived into the world of job's tears. Was amazed by how healthy it is. It would also solve some problems I have, but, I cannot get the answers (from searching internet) to the questions I have. Maybe in this forum there are people with experience in this grass.

We are situated in Thailand, so that solves the climate problem. My questions are:

1. With it's protein content 15-16% it seems good to feed to chickens. Anyone having done this? seeds and grass?
2. In our shops it is easy to buy seeds (for cooking), they are white, with a groove. Can this be used for cultivation? (waiting for 4 weeks sprouting for result is long time!)
3. There are 2 types according to wikipedia. The wild one (used for beads) and the "food" type. We are looking for the food type. Anyone here with experience with that type?

One great advantage for us would be to replace the so called ya-ka grass. It is used in this country for making roofpanels, but it is highly invasive, spreads (horizontally) via long deep roots and is not suitable for animal feed. Maybe the job's tears grass could take over....

any info on this grass is welcome!
Tom

I don't have answers to your questions, sorry to say, but I did start a thread about this grain some time back that has quite a lot of info in it.  Maybe something in here will be helpful:

https://permies.com/t/97705/Job-Tears-coix-lacryma-jobi

HI,

Yeah, I read it... but only after I posted my own. Before posting I did a search for job's tears and your post did not show up, but after I posted my own post, a poppup appeared referring to your post... anyway, good info there indeed..  The EFN is no use to me as it is in the US. But the picture of the seeds on their site is interesting (https://www.experimentalfarmnetwork.org/group/20) as it is different as the bead type.

This might help, because on ebay there are some offers but offer little info on which type. The german, french and other languages there offer no help. maybe the picture does...

will post here some info if I get any in the future.

Tommy, to avoid disappointment, I suggest contacting the EFN before ordering seed from them.  The seeds I got I think are the ornamental strain (they are very pretty) rather than the edible variety.  They seem to have germinated quite well in my polytunnel, but I need to weed them and maybe transplant them to give them more space to grow.

Hi Nancy,

thanks for your reply. most likely I will not order from them, but use the picture to compare other findings.

I also bumped into a very interesting research paper (downloadable pdf) from POLS about the assesment of genetic diversity of job's tears. Having browsed through it, I could not find info I was looking for, but the paper has a lot of other value. It confirms the anti cancer properties of the oil of the seeds for example.

link to paper