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Pseudo-Cereals uncovered: Hydroponics, Microgreens & Nutrition · Hydroponics Daily

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome back to Hydroponics Daily, your go-to podcast for everything soilless cultivation.
• 0:06
  I'm getting a bit bored of that intro now, I need to mix it up.
• 0:08
  You can think of another one, email me in.
• 0:10
  I'm Dr. Russell Sharp and I'm the founder of E-Treamer and we make fertilizers,
• 0:15
  biostimulants and biopesticides.
• 0:17
  Everything's novel, everything's unique to us.
• 0:20
  And today I thought I'd talk about an interesting topic that I'm interested
• 0:23
  in and And that is the topic of pseudo cereals or pseudo grains.
• 0:27
  Pseudo means false. And cereal means, you know, wheat, barley.
• 0:33
  Oats, maize, maize is cereal, I think it is.
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  Basically anything in the grass family that's farmed in a field and combined
• 0:40
  harvested to harvest something that we make into a stable food crop.
• 0:45
  Like bread, pasta, rice is a cereal. So yeah, anything like that.
• 0:50
  So that's what cereals are. Pseudo cereals are false cereals.
• 0:53
  And that's because they are non-grasses, but they are consumed in the same way we would cereals.
• 1:00
  So what's this got to do with hydroponics? Well, we don't grow cereals hydroponically yet, if ever.
• 1:07
  That's because they are large-scale and lower-value crops, and hydroponics is
• 1:14
  reserved for higher-value crops.
• 1:16
  There's lots of people experimenting with growing cereals hydroponically,
• 1:19
  seeing if they can make it commercially.
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  Often these are for publicity purposes rather
• 1:24
  than actually economically viable projects although
• 1:27
  academically studying it to look at
• 1:30
  the potential for growing
• 1:33
  cereals in space and on Mars and things like this for colonization of
• 1:37
  other planets and space travel and then
• 1:39
  we talked about in a previous one there was a the United Nations were looking
• 1:44
  at growing cereals as microgreens for fodder production in the Aral Sea where
• 1:50
  the soil isn't conducive to growth and microgreens for fodder for animal feed
• 1:56
  was better than feeding them just the grain on their own. There was more nutrients in there.
• 2:00
  And we also grow cereals for wheatgrass.
• 2:06
  We talked about wheatgrass previously and that's a nutritious growth, nutritious drink.
• 2:12
  Well, you can never feed it to your cat so you can put it in a food processor
• 2:16
  and make it into a juice that you then drink and it's thought to give you lots
• 2:19
  of vitamins and minerals and phytochemicals, plant chemicals.
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  And but can be a bit distasteful so
• 2:28
  cereals and hydroponics have been grown for a while but what
• 2:31
  about pseudo cereals well i'm not aware of anyone who's growing pseudo
• 2:34
  cereals for hydroponically let me
• 2:37
  just explain what sort of there are so for pseudo
• 2:40
  cereals the most common ones you will have heard of are buckwheat very
• 2:43
  very common eastern europe cuisine not so common in western europe cuisine nowadays
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  amaranth is a amaranth is a pseudo cereal quinoa or quinoa and chaya chia.
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  Chia seeds goosefoot is
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  another one and chenopodium album
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  is the scientific name and fat
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  hen chenopodium rubrum is also a pseudo cereal
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  but they're not grown commercially but it's
• 3:17
  thought that the plants it's a weed in the uk fat hen
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  and it's thought it was brought over by the romans and the
• 3:23
  romans were using it as a cereal as a pseudo cereal
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  as a crop and now it's just not grown anymore that's
• 3:29
  how it got to the uk same with rabbits as well i think those grow they were
• 3:34
  brought over as a food stock and then released into the world and they survived
• 3:37
  so pseudo cereals not grown hydroponically widespread but they can be grown
• 3:43
  as a microgreen and as you know I'm interested in microgreens at the moment.
• 3:46
  And I've experimented with two. I've done chia, worked really well.
• 3:50
  And I did quinoa, and that just didn't germinate very well.
• 3:55
  So that was interesting. I'll probably do a few more. I'm certainly going to
• 3:58
  try book wheat, and I might try amaranth as well, because they're common microgreens.
• 4:03
  And the reason I'm talking about them today is because there's been a review
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  in the Journal of Serial Science that examined how growing the likes of amaranth,
• 4:13
  quinoa, sorghum and wheat in a microgreen stage,
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  affects their properties. And there's a reason why they're looking at it.
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  It's because there's a number of issues with just eating grains all the time.
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  They only have modest protein levels, which is, you know, the protein level
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  is not going to change much as the microgene.
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  Poor mineral availability, that's a crucial one.
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  And the anti-nutritional compounds like phytic acid can restrict their nutritional potential.
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  So a number of cereals and pseudo cereals,
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  they can often have too much phytic acid and
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  so you grow them as a microgreen and those are reduced and they produce
• 4:49
  other vitamins they'll produce vitamin c in and
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  they'll produce beta carotene so vitamin
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  a deficiency and things like this can be reduced so the growth of microgreens
• 4:59
  hydroponically has a massive potential for human health and human nutrition
• 5:04
  worldwide what else can we say about this i've said about sorghum sorghum is
• 5:08
  a massive crop in the u.s and a vast majority of that sorghum goes to China
• 5:13
  for making white spirits.
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  Not the white spirit you would buy in B&Q or Home Depot for paint removal and things like this.
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  White spirit is their alcohol of choice, their liquor of choice.
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  And so sorghum is imported in massive volumes from the US and they have to have
• 5:33
  specific problems, specific type of sorghum as well.
• 5:36
  I've grown sorghum in the past. it's not frost tolerant here in the uk
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  but it's an interesting plant and produces amazing flowers
• 5:42
  that are wind pollinated but you can eat it as a
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  microgreen so if anyone if you
• 5:48
  see the term pseudo cereal you'll know that it
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  is plants that are grown like a cereal eaten like
• 5:54
  a cereal but are actually not in the grass family so
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  amaranth quinoa sorghum chia buckwheat
• 6:02
  fat hen things like this short one today but i thought it's an interesting one
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  pseudo serials thank you very much for listening i'll be on here again tomorrow
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  with another amazing podcast filling you with information that you didn't know
• 6:16
  or a news article to keep you up to date thank you very much for listening until tomorrow goodbye.